Benjamin Cheung

Benjamin Cheung




Lecturer
Department of Psychology

ACAM Minor Advisor
Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies

Email: bycheung@psych.ubc.ca

Email (for advising): acam.advising@ubc.ca

Quick Links

Website

Benjamin Cheung is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology, teaching courses primarily on research methodology, social psychology, and cultural psychology. He came as a settler on unceded Musqueam territory from the former British colony of Hong Kong, and has been interested in acculturation and bicultural identity ever since.

As an undergraduate student at UBC, he majored in Psychology (with an emphasis on cultural psychology), and Asian Language and Culture (with a specialization in Korean). He obtained his MA and Ph.D. at UBC, working on projects related to cultural adaptation. Understanding the intersection of cultural environment, cultural identity, and cultural experience has always been an interest of his. He hopes to continuing learning as an affiliated faculty with ACAM.

Daniel Chen (BA, Asian Studies)

Daniel Chen 陈丹宁 (he/him) is an aspiring documentary journalist and completed his BA degree in Asian Studies and Asian Canadian and Asian migration studies at the University of British Columbia. He has moved between Los Angeles and Beijing and currently calls Vancouver home. ACAM has played a large role in his involvement in Vancouver Chinatown includes producing content for the A Seat at the Table exhibition, Speak My Language radio documentary, and Suzhou Alley Women’s Mural.

Why were you drawn to the ACAM program? 

I was drawn to the program’s course offerings stood out from traditional degrees through content that resonated with my personal experience as a Chinese immigrant. I enjoyed learning about the intersectionality of the diasporic migrant experience with other academic fields whether it was through English literature, sociology, psychology, history, etc. The community-based engagement opportunities that the ACAM program offers have helped gain valuable working experience and provided the space for me to find belonging with my local community. Overall, I can comfortably say that the ACAM program has been the most influential part of academic journey at UBC.

Have you completed any ACAM related projects? Would you like to share your most memorable experiences, and if possible a link to your project?

Outside of being a student, I’ve also been involved in ACAM’s funded community projects (Yarrow Society’s Speak My Language radio documentary project and the Suzhou Alley Women’s Mural digital stories). Collaborating with Yarrow Society kickstarted my ongoing involvement with Vancouver Chinatown. Working with volunteers, local artists, business owners, and speaking to seniors in the community, helped me develop a relationship with Vancouver Chinatown. We had intimate conversations with Chinese seniors about their experience with language barriers in our healthcare system. Community-based engagement opportunities like this were the most memorable experiences during my time at UBC. And I believe it’s through these interactions, students can learn about various inequalities in society and the importance of culture in a meaningful way.

What is one piece of advice you would give your first year self?

First of all, I would inform myself of the ACAM program! I didn’t hear about the program until my third year at UBC so I wonder what other opportunities I could’ve encountered or interests I would’ve taken time to pursuit if I dug into the ACAM rabbit hole sooner. I would also tell myself to be less afraid of making the wrong decision in life. Go knee deep into whatever field to the point where you develop tangible skillsets instead of pondering between options and wasting time through inaction.

ACAM310

What is the role of culture in fostering community and belonging? How can art, literature, and media reveal suppressed histories and experiences? How can the arts create new identities and publics, and mobilize them to effect social change?

This course focuses on the rich and vibrant history of Asian Canadian cultural production in the Vancouver area and its relationship to anti-racist movements for redress, representation, and equality. The first part of this course uses archival collections, oral histories, and other research materials to examine how Asian Canadian culture emerged starting in the 1970s. We will look at key publications such as Inalienable Rice (1979), the first Asian Canadian anthology, and Rungh magazine (1992-); exhibitions such as The Japanese Canadians: A Dream of Riches (1977) ; media productions such as the Pender Guy radio show (1976-81); and groundbreaking art exhibitions such as Yellow Peril Reconsidered (1990) and Racy, Sexy (1993). The second part of the course considers how contemporary Asian Canadian culture engages ongoing debates about historical memory, identity, assimilation, gender, and sexuality. We will look at institutional access and support, funding structures, mentoring practices, and public reception. As much as possible, course assignments will involve visits to local cultural events and institutions (such as galleries, museums, and other art spaces) as well as learning from community elders and practitioners.

The goals of this class include: learning about the diversity of Asian Canadian cultural history; analyzing the role of culture in community formation and mobilization; developing skills such as grant writing, archival research, and digital production; understanding the ethics and responsibilities of community-engaged research.

In 2024W, ACAM_V 310-001 – Asian Canadian Cultural Studies will be offered in Term 2 on Tuesday and Thursday, 2-3:30pm.  It will be taught by Dr. Chris Lee from the Department of English Language and Literatures.

Interested in how this course has evolved?  Here’s a course trailer for this course’s predecessor, ACAM 320C –

[youtube width=”550″ height=”390″]https://youtu.be/TgsIGRMZANk[/youtube] 

Chris Lee

Associate Professor

Department of English Language and Literatures

Director

Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program

Email: chris.lee@ubc.ca

Chris Lee is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program (ACAM). He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (2012), which received the literary criticism book award from the Association for Asian American Studies, and a co-editor (with Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, and Larissa Lai) of Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki (2013). His research focuses on diaspora Chinese literary thought during the Cold War, Asian Canadian visual culture, racial capitalism and Asian migration and historical narratives of Chinese migration. He received a Killam Research Prize in 2015.

Chris Lee




Associate Professor

Department of English Language and Literatures

Email: chris.lee@ubc.ca

Chris Lee is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program (ACAM). He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (2012), which received the literary criticism book award from the Association for Asian American Studies, and a co-editor (with Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, and Larissa Lai) of Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki (2013). His research focuses on diaspora Chinese literary thought during the Cold War, Asian Canadian visual culture, racial capitalism and Asian migration and historical narratives of Chinese migration. He received a Killam Research Prize in 2015.

Amanda Cheong




Assistant Professor

Department of Sociology

Email: amanda.cheong@ubc.ca

https://sociology.ubc.ca/profile/amanda-cheong/

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. I study how legal status and documentation shape people’s lives, working primarily with stateless, undocumented, and refugee communities in Southeast Asia and North America. My mission as an academic is motivated by my own family’s experiences of statelessness and exclusion in their birthplace of Brunei.

Education

Ph.D., Sociology & Social Policy, Princeton University (2019)

M.A., Sociology & Social Policy, Princeton University (2016)

B.A. (Hons), Sociology, University of British Columbia (2012)

Research

Book Project:

Omitted Lives:
The Vital Costs & Consequences of the Legal Identity Crisis 

An estimated 1 in 4 children under the age of 5 worldwide have not been registered at birth. Why, in our modern world, do so many people continue to fall through the administrative cracks? Omitted Lives offers a new thesis for unraveling the paradox of the civil registration gap. Set in the context of Malaysia, the book is an ethnography of the lives of marginalized families who have gone unaccounted for at the most basic level: the recording of their vital events. By chronicling families’ circuitous and risky journeys to obtain basic recognition, and the papers to prove it, I offer a humanizing account of vital statistics and their sociopolitical—and even mortal—significance. I found that who gets counted, and how, are inherently political choices rather than technical imperatives, and that these choices can be made in ways that omit unwanted populations from the nation by depriving them of the documentary means to prove their legal personhood. Popular fears about the demographic threats posed by migrants have transformed understandings about the recording of vital events from administrative procedures to declarations about the ethnoracial and moral boundaries of national identity and belonging.

Other Research: 

My other work is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on a range of methods, including ethnography, survey data analysis, archival research, and community action partnerships. Recent projects explore:

  1. Stateless children’s encounters with immigration detention and deportation (published in positions: asia critique);
  2. The interrelated barriers to birth registration and maternal healthcare among stateless and undocumented families (published in Genus: Journal of Population Sciences);
  3. The use of documentation in the erasure, and expulsion of the Rohingya minority from Myanmar (under review);
  4. The impacts of previous undocumented experience on the naturalization propensities of immigrants in the United States (published in the International Migration Review);
  5. The impacts of migration and undocumented experience on the health of Mexican immigrants to the United States (published in the International Migration Review);
  6. How access to driver’s licenses matter for undocumented immigrants, in collaboration with the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (funded by ASA’s Community Action Research Initiative Award, and published in Contexts).

I am a co-investigator on 2 new SSHRC Insight Grant-funded projects:

  • “Sons and Daughters of the Soil: The Making of Citizens and Stateless Persons in Post-Colonial Malaysia.” $283,313. With Jamie Liew (PI).
  •  “Mapping the Discursive and Institutional Landscape of ‘Birth Tourism’ and its Perceived Attack on Canadian Birthright Citizenship.” $223,328. With Megan Gaucher (PI), Yin-Yuan Chen, and Jamie Liew

Y-Dang Troeung




Associate Professor

Department of English Language and Literatures

Email: ytroeung@mail.ubc.ca

Website: http://www.y-dang.com/

Y-Dang Troeung (click to hear) was an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She researched and taught in the fields of transnational Asian literatures, critical refugee studies, global south studies, and critical disability studies. Her monograph, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia (Temple University Press), was published in August 2022. She was a faculty affiliate of the Asian Canadian Studies and Migration Program (ACAM), an Associate Editor of the journal Canadian Literature, and a 2020 Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Her recent publications can be found in Canadian Literature, Brick: A Literary Magazine, Amerasia Journal, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.