Mimi Khúc

Name
Mimi Khúc
Candidate statement
I am a writer, scholar, and teacher of all things unwell.
As contingent faculty for the last 9 years who has chosen a non-tenure-track career path, I actively struggle with--and work to theorize--the precarity that comes with that choice. I carry an intimate knowledge of our changing institutional landscape: the adjunctification of the university, the increasing exploitation of contingent labor, and the neoliberal logics metastasizing across ethnic studies programs.
Like many of us in Asian American studies, my research is on social vulnerabilities. My most recent project, *Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health*, is an arts and humanities intervention that rethinks approaches to Asian American un/wellness, with a focus on academia as a site of violence and care. I am deeply committed to turning our collective attention to the most vulnerable in the academy, particularly as greater pressure bears down upon them.
Our field is changing. More and more of our association’s membership will move in contingent, rather than tenured, circuits. Our board needs a voice for that growing body, one attuned to the full, horrifying scope of its needs and wounds--as well as its organizing potentials, and what all of these, taken together, have to tell us about the futures of Asian American studies.