2026 AADS Undergraduate Research Symposium

Major/Minor: Biology major, Health Policy Certificate

Summary:  This research argues that contemporary East Asian soft power initiatives, particularly South Korea’s Korean Wave and Japan’s Cool Japan, operate through a logic of state-sponsored self-fetishization under global capitalism. Drawing on theories of Orientalism, “racist love,” and fetishization, the paper contends that these governments deliberately package their cultures as consumable, abstracted objects to appeal to Western desires shaped by racist fantasy. Using Mila Zuo’s Carnal Orient as a conceptual frame, the project shows how cultural export reproduces structures of consumption that render Asian identity hyper-visible yet dehumanized. Through case studies of K-pop, anime, and Western media consumption, the research demonstrates how abstraction, aesthetic standardization, and manufactured intimacy reinforce fetishistic desire rather than genuine cross-cultural exchange. Ultimately, the paper argues that while economically profitable, these soft power strategies are ethically complicit in sustaining racial hierarchies and the dehumanization that enables real-world violence, and it calls for models of cultural engagement grounded in reciprocity, intellectual accountability, and subjecthood rather than consumption.

Major: Program II – Storytelling as Resistance: Healing Cultural Trauma through Storytelling and Narrative

Summary: Since the beginning of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip in 2023, the social media landscape in Palestine has been transfigured into a site of critical documentation, mobilization, and possibility by civilian journalists—into what numerous scholars and international organizations have termed the world’s first “live-streamed genocide". My project examines one such social media account, that of 11-year-old Palestinian Renad Attallah, in relationship to frameworks offered by the field of Critical Refugee Studies (CRS) which seek to reorient depictions of refugees toward the creative and critical potentiality that their lifeworlds offer. I contend that Renad's documentation of her cooking and daily life embodies Feminist Refugee Epistemology (FRE) by depicting the joy and survival practices which play out in the quotidian domain, refusing the totalizing logic that renders Gaza as ruin.

Major in Statistical Science, Minor in Asian American Diaspora Studies

Summary: As I grew up, my mother never failed to share stories of her life before and after immigrating to the U.S. Driven by curiosity, this project investigates my Vietnamese relatives’ financial habits as they fought to survive in the U.S. South. The information presented stems from nine oral interviews in which the interviewees described their experiences working in labor-intensive jobs to achieve a middle-class financial status. Reflecting upon the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the following exodus of the ‘boat people,’ and additional sponsorship to America, the project serves as an analysis of the Vietnamese-American diaspora and as documentation of my family’s history.

Major in Economics & minor in Art History

Summary: My research examines how patriarchal intimacy can operate as a structured form of violence in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian to challenge the assumption that intimacy is inherently private and nurturing. Drawing on theorists including Lauren Berlant, Leslie Bow, Christina Sharpe, Lisa Lowe, and bell hooks, I argue that the novel reveals violence not as intimacy’s failure, but as one of its governing mechanisms under patriarchy. I focus on three interconnected dynamics: (1) the consolidation of male authority through familial and marital hierarchies, (2) the production of a  “ideal woman” archetype that defines female refusal as deviance requiring correction, and (3) the recruitment of women as enforcers who police one another through the language of care and survival. By tracing Yeong-hye’s escalating resistance in the novel, I show how her refusal destabilizes the “normal” world her family depends. Importantly, her disruption shows the potential to awaken others into imagining forms of intimacy not organized around possession and violence but simply a shared presence.

I will be presenting Idahome, an art zine synthesizing methods of how community, especially in regard to and a result of family practices, impact Asian American identity formation in Idaho. Inspiration for Idahome was drawn from analysis of the University of Idaho’s “Oral Histories of the Post-1965 Lives of Asian Americans in Idaho”, a collection of sixteen interviews done by Kathy Min in 2020.

Summary - Exploring intersections of social capital, familism, and preventative health, my research highlights ethnic heterogeneity within household composition and U.S. healthcare engagement. In particular, my work investigates the integration of Asian cultural values into U.S. eldercare, a synergy notably influential in multigenerational living and health management patterns. For elderly Asian Americans––86% of whom are foreign-born––health behaviors are often jointly informed by Asian caregiving norms and American acculturation (Wu & Qi, 2022). Accordingly, understanding filial expectations for Asians compared to non-Asians may distinguish key drivers of differential effect of familial on health management among elderly Americans.