In this audio interview, we hear from Professor Kandice Chuh, PublicsLab’s Interim Faculty Lead, about her experience as a faculty mentor to Queenie Sukhadia. She speaks about the concept of mutuality, the ethics of public scholarship, and how her understanding of public knowledge has developed through the lenses of ethnic studies and feminisms.

The interview was recorded by Jess Applebaum in February 2023.

PDF Transcript: Interview with PublicsLab Interim Faculty Lead, Professor Kandice Chuh

“One of our jobs as people inside of spaces like the CUNY Graduate Center is to try to allow our formal learning to be as thoroughly informed by that which is the informal, non-education, non-institutional learning as possible. Because it actually makes us smarter. And our job is to become smarter about ideas, about how the world works, about trying to make the world work better, for more people.”

– Kandice Chuh

Kandice Chuh is a professor of English, American Studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also a member of the M.A. in Liberal Studies faculty, and affiliate faculty to the Africana Studies program. She is currently Executive Officer of the PhD Program in English, and in the past served as Coordinator of the American Studies Certificate Program and acting associate director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. The author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities ‘after Man’ (2019), which won the Association for Asian American Studies Humanities and Cultural Studies Book Award, and Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003), which won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Award, Chuh is co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001). President of the American Studies Association from 2017-18, Chuh is a member of the Association for Asian American Studies and the Modern Language Association. She is at work on a collection of essays titled The Disinterested Teacher, and her current research focuses on Asian racialization in the era of globalization. Chuh teaches courses on aesthetic theory, queer of color critique, women of color feminisms, decolonial studies, and Asian and Asian American racialization.

You can hear more about the English program’s curriculum grant that Professor Chuh references in our interview series on Doctoral Curriculum Enhancement Grants.

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