The Localized History Project is a youth driven history collective housed at the Asian American/Asian Research Institute@CUNY. We recently were awarded 2.5 million dollars to work in collaboration with the Asian American Education Project to build NYC’s first ever youth driven, community led, AAPI Curriculum for NYC Public Schools! You can see our digital historical exhibits on our website, and find accompanying lesson plans on the AAEdu website. Listen to us speak to our work on All Things Considered.

‘We Anchor Ourselves in History:’ The Study and Struggle of South Asian Diasporic Youth

Throughout history, young people have had an irrepressible desire to study histories of struggle—or the efforts that came before them to fight for a more liberatory and just world. What is it that young people gain when they anchor themselves in truthful histories, histories that are often not taught, or are erased, by the state? What do such exercises give them, and how does it shape their sense of self, identity, and belonging? How does it craft their political consciousness?  This dissertation begins with present day New York City youth, and investigates their inquiry, analysis, and conclusions about South Asian Diasporic organizing in three moments of imperial boomerang: the 1970s and 80s United Kingdom, the 1990s and early 2000s United States, and the present US and UK. The dissertation introduces the method of youth participatory historiography.

Worldbuilding Pedagogies

Standardized testing has shown to perpetuate racism and colonialism via high school curricula. However, research often fails to include youth in its inquiry and solutions. Worldbuilding pedagogy uses critical game based learning as a means to radically counter state mandated practices and the constraints they present. This YPAR project co-constructs historical role playing games as a means to teach students more complex, rigorous, and truthful global history. It also inserts speculative, fictive, and world building possibilities into the game to reject the settler colonial logics and power structures embedded into the study of history, and centers youth agency as critical to building of new worlds. See more at our website: www.worldbuildingpedagogies.org, and specifically check out our game “A Peoples History of the Opium Wars.”