Korean Indigenized Trauma-Informed Spirituality, Ritual, and Practice for Women and Femmes in Diaspora
Christine Hong | Associate Professor, Educational Ministries | Columbia Theological Seminary
Seo Choi | Shaman and Founder, Alpha Sisters Publishing
Sue Kim Park | Associate Dean, Contextual Education and International Partnerships and Assistant Professor, Contextual Theology | Columbia Theological Seminary
Rev. Sunghee Han | Supervisor, Clinical Pastoral Education | Wellstar Health System
This project will create practices and rituals for negotiating and understanding suffering, pain, healing, and creation through a transnational Korean indigenous spiritualist feminist lens. Through peer-guided, interreligious roundtable discussion and study in six monthly in-person meetings and one four-day retreat, we will read, discuss, and create across our three areas of expertise: Christian practical theology, Korean Shamanism, and spiritual health care. Our work will culminate in the creation of a set of original healing rituals and practices that incorporate an understanding of Christian practical theology, Korean shamanistic ritual, and trauma-informed care for Korean women in the diaspora. This project will consider how our resources might accompany women who have experienced harm through their experiences with the Church. We hope such a resource can be used alongside different religious resources used by other AANH-PI people to continually challenge, in anticolonial ways, different diasporic colonial Christianities.
Keywords: Korean American, Christianity, Shamanism, Health Care
The Origins of the Silent Exodus Myth: Korean American Evangelical Oral Histories in the Greater Los Angeles Area
Justin Tse | Associate Professor, Religion and Culture (Education) | Singapore Management University
Linda (Yun Ja) Kwak | PhD Student, Theology | Boston University
Chanhee Heo | Postdoctoral Research Associate, Religious Studies | John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics (Washington University in St. Louis)
Ellen Zhou | MA Student, Pastoral Care and Counseling | Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
This working group will conduct an oral history of the origins of what Asian American evangelicals have mythologized as the “silent exodus” in the Greater Los Angeles Area. The term originates from a front-page article that Los Angeles Times staff writer Doreen Carvajal published on May 9, 1994, concerning what the “silent exodus” by which Korean Americans in Los Angeles Koreatown referred to the opening of English-language ministries in Koreatown churches, as well as new English-speaking multi-ethnic congregations in the Los Angeles suburbs. We seek to conduct an oral history of the term “silent exodus” and examine whether it can be traced to historical events in Koreatown in the early 1990s, including the 1992 Los Angeles uprising.
Keywords: Korean American, Christianity, Oral History
Refugee Reconnections: Vietnamese-American organizing in the California Carceral State
Victoria Huynh
Graduate Student, Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley
This research project centers Vietnamese-American grassroots organizing as a site to theorize a framework of healing from refugee trauma. As Vietnamese refugees in the United States are continually displaced by war, incarceration, and deportation, this project asks: how do Vietnamese refugees draw from their spiritual and cultural traditions in order to address the fractures of trauma? How might these embodied, epistemological practices help activists to challenge the state structures responsible for displacement? To examine these questions, in-depth interviews and participant-observation will be conducted with a California-wide network of organizations fighting to free Vietnamese communities from incarceration and deportation: the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, API-RISE, and VietRise. This research project aims to interrogate refugee trauma as the consequence of the U.S. carceral and immigration systems, and to explore spiritual modalities of healing.
Keywords: Activism, Healing, Refugee, Vietnamese American