Dr. Shaolu Yu, associate professor of urban studies and chair of Asian studies at Rhodes, has been selected as one of the faculty associates to work on the project Documenting Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Voices and Stories: Community-based Digital Story Telling in St. Louis. The three-year project was initiated by ASIANetwork and is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
The project aims to:
- strengthen community-academic partnerships that are significant for the community
- train and support ASIANetwork member institutions’ faculty and students to undertake community-led AAPI engagement initiatives
- digitally archive, distribute, and publish stories of the lived experiences of AAPI communities
- produce and disseminate educational materials that can be integrated in college curricula across our network
Each year, ASIANetwork will select two sites for a seven-week project to collect Voices and Stories, which could include oral histories, poetic traditions, religious and ritual practices, recipes and culinary practices, songs, dances, discussions around objects, and museum exhibits. Each site team includes students, a site liaison, and a faculty associate. Yu will serve as faculty associate for the team in St. Louis.
Yu was trained as an urban geographer in an interdisciplinary background and has participated in projects in urban studies in China, the U.S., and Canada. She also has developed a comparative and global perspective and a mixed method approach in her research on cities. Her research interests include urban Space and place-making, migration and mobility, race and ethnicity, and Asian urbanism.