While gender studies and ethnic studies, including Asian American Studies, have been institutionalized for more than forty years, the praxis of institutionalization within the context of neoliberalism is a heterogeneous and difficult business. We often oscillate between the stable experience of recognizing and contributing to long-standing intellectual genealogies, while at the same time feeling immense precarity about the formation and existence of programmatic units. What does it mean to build and live in these intellectual spaces and places? What is (im)possible about the strategies we deploy to ensure our existence and the critiques that we make? It may be that austerity and the narrative of crisis result in the upward redistribution of resources towards STEM. At the same time, how does the university manage difference into diversity? In short, this presentation considers what does it mean to do gender and ethnic studies within the university of austerity.

Jigna Desai is Professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota.