A three day series of panels, performances and films addressing issues that face the Asian Pacific American community will begin today and continue throughout the weekend as part of the 13th Biennial Midwest Asian Pacific American Conference.

The conference features scholars Helen Zia, former Oberlin College professor Jeanette Roan, New York-based youth organizer Amita Swadhin, and performers Fred Ho and Magdalena Gmez, among other speakers and performers.

The theme of the conference is “Changing Faces, Facing Changes: Reinforcing the Commitment to the APA Movement. “

“The main aim of the conference is to educate our community and other people outside of the community about issues that we feel are significant at this time,” conference co-chair Rashne Limki, junior, said.
The organizers particularly wanted the conference to address intersectional ties of identity.

Limki and co-chair Vivian Liao, college senior, were motivated by what they see as Oberlin’s changing student body.

“The dynamics of the students who are here are a lot different than from when I was a first year,” Liao said.

This year’s first-year class counts 69 Asian American students, or nine percent of the total classthe largest percentage in at least ten years.

Liao, however, is concerned that the Asian cultural presence on campus is decreasing despite the high enrollment of APAs.

“As a senior, I want to know that our efforts won’t go unnoticed because people just don’t care anymore. I’m really afraid of apathy within the community,” she said.

Liao’s concerns are echoed by other upperclassmen activists.

“Because of the four-year institutional memory, students don’t know what has occurred on campus before them,” Senior Maricar Camaya added. “The incoming students don’t know, for example, about the fight for need-blind admission in the nineties.”

“I hope that students will continue to mobilize collectively to create change on campus,” Camaya said. “The conference illustrates this kind of organizing.”

The APA Conference began in 1972 as a student initiative to bring APA studies to campus where they did not exist. The long-term goal of the original organizers was to institutionalize Asian studies at Oberlin.

The panel “A/Pas in Higher Education” will focus on the movement of APA studies in academia.

“[It will address] how the field of APA Studies is moving to emphasize research across ethnic and racial groups, which is useful to understand the pressures facing not only APA students, faculty and administration, but also those of other minorities as well,” Sociology Professor Pawan Dhingra, one of the panelists in the workshop, said.

One point of contention in APA studies is exactly who belongs in the category. The panel Pacific Islanders Under the Rubric of “Asian/Pacific American” will discuss differences and commonalities among APA communities, and how they may contribute to an overarching “APA” identity.

The conference begins on Friday at 4:30 pm with Jeanette Roan’s panel, “Recreating Our Visibility: Deconstructing APA Images” in Wilder 215. The weekend culminates in Saturday night’s banquet with Helen Zia’s keynote address at 5:30pm in the Root Room.