Carolyn Chen, Executive Director of APARRI, delivered the following introductory remarks at the APARRI 2025 conference, where she reflected on the magic of APARRI’s intellectual community and culture of care.
Welcome to APARRI 2025! I am Carolyn Chen, Executive Director of the Asian Pacific American Religion Research Initiative, or APARRI, and Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.
To our old friends, welcome back to Berkeley. And to our new friends, I’m so delighted that you are here. If you are coming to APARRI for the first time, I’m going to warn you, APARRI is not your typical conference. Now it’s true that most conferences don’t host an open bar and feed you Peking Duck and boba, like we do. Nor do most conferences give you useful, collector’s item swag, like we do.
No, what makes APARRI different is the quality of our intellectual community.
What you will experience over the next 3 days is what we call “APARRI magic,” the spirit of radical welcome and intellectual generosity that defines the APARRI community. APARRI magic is the collective energy of 130 good people coming together to be supported, and to support one another, in the wholeness of who we are…as scholars of APA religion, and also as storytellers, filmmakers, artists, activists, monastics, shamans, and faith leaders, recognizing the powerful ways that spirituality and religion shape our communities, politics, art, scholarship, and personhood.
When you experience kindness at APARRI – which you will – know that it is not a random act of kindness. It is the intentional kindness of one APARRIsta paying forward the generosity and support that was once extended to them.
That’s my own story. I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley working on a dissertation on Taiwanese immigrant religion, with a committee that knew absolutely nothing about the topic. The first person to extend APARRI magic to me was Jane Iwamura, then a graduate student in Rhetoric at Berkeley, when she welcomed me into a working group on Asian American religions with Russell Jeung, Youngmi Pak, and Rudy Busto in 1997.
The second moment of APARRI magic was when Paul Spickard, the then chair of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara, came up to Jane Iwamura and me at the AAAS after our panel on Asian American religions, and said to us, “This is really important stuff that we need to know about. I want to learn more. I want to support you.” Paul gave us $15K from UC Santa Barbara, and hosted the first APARRI conference there in 1999.
Talk about generosity. $15k then is about $30k now. How many of you department chairs and administrators out there would walk up to a random graduate student at the AAR or AAAS and offer them $30,000 to organize a conference?
And yet, APARRI is made up of countless stories just like mine.
At APARRI, community is fundamental to scholarship because we believe that knowledge production is a social enterprise. AI, at the end of the day, spits out information. It collates, synthesizes, and summarizes existing information. AI knows everything, but it understands nothing. In order to create new knowledge, and to achieve real wisdom, you need the carriers of ideas – humans – to discover, to understand, to inspire, and to befriend one another. And there is no better way I know to do that than to get to a group of scholars across multiple disciplines and religious traditions, around a table to share a meal. (That’s the secret to why we feed you so much). Thank you to Derek Wu for a thoughtful discussion that helped me with the aforementioned ideas.
Generosity, friendship, welcome, and community – this is the energy that fuels APARRI scholarship.
Now, none of us would be in the room here today without the support of a few key people. We first got to know Dr. Jonathan Van Antwerpan, the program director of religion and theology at the Henry Luce Foundation, four years ago. Since then, he’s attended every single APARRI, and he’s been our number one fan. Jonathan, thank you for believing in us, advocating for us, and supporting us. You get who we are, and you allow us to dream big and dream wild.
Along with the Henry Luce Foundation’s support, we’ve received generous funding from the UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences, the UCB Division of Arts & Humanities, and the Institute for Teaching Diversity and Social Justice, of whom our own Khyati Joshi is ED. I am deeply grateful to all of our funders for believing in our mission to advance the public and scholarly knowledge of APA religions.
With their help, APARRI has granted hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund nearly 45 projects on APA religions over the last 3 years. These diverse and innovative projects include a project that brings together Asian American and Black faith communities to create green space in east Oakland, a podcast series on Hindu American women walking a fine line against Hindu nationalism, a book on religion gender and caste in the Punjabi Sikh diaspora, a dissertation that examines the role of Buddhist practice in Asian American addiction recovery, and a project archiving the cultural and spiritual significance of Hima (giant clam shells) in Guam.
You can see the full list of funded projects here.
This year, we have embarked on several exciting initiatives:
We are launching our inaugural cohort of Media Fellows, a talented group of 12 scholars who will be trained in public scholarship right after this year’s APARRI.
Together with Axis Mundi Media and the Smithsonian Institute, APARRI is producing a storytelling podcast series on Asian American religious experiences for the “Under Gods Initiative,” an initiative that challenges the narrative that America is a white Christian nation.
Now, let me turn briefly to the conference theme, “Past as Present: APA Religions, Renewal and Collective Care.”
How can we think about renewal and collective care when it feels like the world is burning around us, you might ask. The rise of an authoritarian state, the pillaging of our public institutions, the use of unnecessary military force on protestors, and the unending violence in Gaza – in light of these emergencies, devoting three whole days to reflect on renewal and collective care may feel frivolous and foolish.
But if there’s one thing I learned in the last year, and especially after the very depressing plenary session on the elections at last year’s APARRI, it’s that we are not experiencing an aberrant moment in American history, where we can sprint towards recovery or change, but that we are in the middle of an ultra marathon that started decades ago, and we are nowhere near the finish line. With that in mind, rest, renewal and care are not optional, but absolutely necessary for survival and victory.
The conference theme invites us to reflect on what we need to be renewed, and to gather strength from that one source of power that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, big tech, AI, and DOGE cannot take from us – the strength of community and each other. This year, I’ve been leaning into community more and more. I’ve started to sing in a choir because I need to make music with other people. I’ve joined my local protests because I need to wave a sign and shout with other people. And I have especially relished my twice monthly meetings with the APARRI managing board, because I need to dream with other people. APARRIstas, in the next three days, may we find renewal in the sharing of good ideas, good food, and good company with each other.