Vince Schleitwiler
Election
Position
Name
Vince Schleitwiler
Candidate statement
I became interested in Asian American studies as an undergraduate organizer in the 1990s, as a field that aimed not just to diversify academia for people like me—a Japanese American first-gen-college student from Chicago—but to radically re-imagine its values and practices. This vision sustained me through a career on and then off the tenure track, and in a variety of contingent positions.
But so much of the work that’s supposed to make our field different—community-based scholarship, undergraduate teaching serving underserved communities, even program-building—is done by contingent faculty. A commitment to such labor is often stigmatizing, and damages junior scholars’ prospects for tenure and tenure-track positions, even though it is essential to our collective vision. I’m interested in helping AAAS advocate for more equitable academic labor practices, serve the needs of different types of contingent faculty, and learn from our perspectives about what our field actually looks like in the world, and what it might become.
Currently, I teach Asian American and comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington. My writing encompasses public arts and humanities projects, nonacademic criticism and journalism, and conventional scholarship, including a monograph, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific (NYU, 2017).
But so much of the work that’s supposed to make our field different—community-based scholarship, undergraduate teaching serving underserved communities, even program-building—is done by contingent faculty. A commitment to such labor is often stigmatizing, and damages junior scholars’ prospects for tenure and tenure-track positions, even though it is essential to our collective vision. I’m interested in helping AAAS advocate for more equitable academic labor practices, serve the needs of different types of contingent faculty, and learn from our perspectives about what our field actually looks like in the world, and what it might become.
Currently, I teach Asian American and comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington. My writing encompasses public arts and humanities projects, nonacademic criticism and journalism, and conventional scholarship, including a monograph, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific (NYU, 2017).