Defense Date

5-8-2024

Graduation Date

Summer 8-10-2024

Availability

Immediate Access

Submission Type

dissertation

Degree Name

PhD

Department

Psychology

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Committee Chair

Lori Koelsch

Committee Member

Elizabeth Fein

Committee Member

Autumn Redcross

Keywords

virtual ethnography, critical phenomenology, critical race, abolition, decolonization, lived body, critical consciousness

Abstract

Anti-Asian racism and violence in the U.S. both historically and currently impacts the Asian American community, leading to widespread fear and negative mental health consequences for Asian Americans. This has been widely discussed in the media due to the rise in anti-Asian rhetoric and attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, psychological literature does not typically address the effects of the history and politics of Asian America on Asian American mental health. In particular, psychological literature does not engage with radical political perspectives which situate Asian American mental health within the broader context of structural oppression and processes of racialization. This project examines the intersection of anti-Asian racism and mental health concerns through a virtual ethnography of the Subtle Asian Mental Health (SAMH) Facebook group, a peer to peer support group for members of the Asian diaspora. This project engages a radical abolitionist and decolonial lens to understand the impact of racialization and racial formation on Asian American mental health. This project also utilizes a critical relational approach which allows for the dialogical negotiation of an abolitionist and decolonial perspective with a range of politicized views expressed by participants to engage novel understandings of radical approaches to Asian American mental health. This project explores radical understandings of Asian American mental health through dynamics of power, embodiment, and consciousness within the perspectives and everyday experiences of Asian Americans. In particular, it explores the ongoing negotiation of structural and interpersonal violence through resistance against political subjection, the sedimentation and transformation of violence within the lived body through historical time, and development of critical consciousness of racialized alienation.

Language

English

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