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ASIAN AMERICANS IN THE GREATER WASHINGTON-BALTIMORE REGION

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course will examine Asian immigration to the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area. The Greater Washington area is America's fifth largest Asian population center. However, there is still very little scholarship about Asian Americans in this region. We envision this course to be the first step in a larger University of Maryland Asian American Studies Program project that will begin to fill the information gap on Asian Americans.

The course is team-taught by two professors of Asian American Studies, sociologist Dr. Dae Young Kim and historian Dr. Lisa R. Mar. It will bridge various disciplines to expose students to cross-disciplinary research methods. We believe that combining social science and humanities perspectives will greatly enrich our students' understanding of immigration, a key American phenomenon.

A course that focuses on Asian immigration to Greater Washington also provides a comparative approach to the study of immigration in urban centers and how local conditions and structures affect migration and adaptation patterns. We will explore the history of Asian American communities in the metropolitan Washington-Baltimore area, their settlement patterns, their social, economic, cultural, and political experiences in the region, as well as their influence in the nation's capital. Each student will be asked to research an original paper that adds new knowledge about the history or sociology of Asian Americans in the region. Each student will also create an associated web-based presentation with a chance to be published on the Asian American Studies website. This course is part of our longer term commitment to developing educational resources about Asian Americans in this region, in hopes that students, teachers, policy makers, journalists and businesses will benefit.

Immigration has and will continue to intensify the process of diversification of U.S. society. The long-term consequences of immigration and its social, economic, cultural and political impacts of its population continue to be critical questions for the United States in this age of globalization.

A CORE Human Cultural Diversity Course [D]