jacquelinejeanb

Image
jacquelinejeanb@arizona.edu
Phone
520-626-4054
Office
Harvill 337A
Barrios, Jacqueline Jean
Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor, Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural & Critical Theory (SCCT)
Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies Minor (APAS)
Faculty Affiliate, Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS)
Faculty-in-Residence, Asian Pacific American Studies Affairs (APASA)

Dr. Barrios’ scholarship focuses on urbanism and narrative, with concentrations in the global 19th century, the contemporary Southwest city, and literature. Her current scholarship investigates London-Pacific trans-urban imaginaries—geographies of East Asian Pacific Rim entanglement with the British capital.  Dr. Barrios specializes in the emerging field of urban humanities, activating stories of place and culture in interdisciplinary, socially engaged projects through a wide array of partnerships within the public humanities.  

 

She is founder of  LitLabs, a hub fusing site-specific research with the interpretation of literary texts, in order to document, animate and uplift the life-worlds of communities who read them. LitLabs are the subject of her  upcoming book, Dear Charles Dickens, Love South LA (under contract, University of Iowa Press), about how she centered the history and daily life of South LA teens in creative engagements with the nineteenth-century long-form novel. Recent LitLabs include the project  Book of the City, multimedia Borderlands translations of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850), and Dear Iola, Love South LA , a digital film festival inspired by Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), created within a year (2020) of historic upheaval.

 

Dr.  Barrios has curated and implemented multi-format exhibitions on urban histories, literature and experimental spatial design methods at multiple sites (public schools, galleries, universities, community centers) and across multiple platforms (installations, film festivals, sonic archives). She co-leads the inaugural Urban Humanities Network for global scholars and practitioners engaged in spatial transdisciplinary research, co-founded the DIGITAL SALON with UCLA’s  Urban Humanities Initiative, and most recently, is involved in creative place-keeping initiatives centered around the historic El Pueblo Neighborhood Center and Tucson’s Southside.

 

At the UArizona, Dr. Barrios is also a core faculty member for the minor in Asian Pacific American Studies, a Faculty-in-Residence at the Asian Pacific American Student Affairs (APASA) and is a founding member of the APA Faculty Network, a new faculty affinity group aimed at raising visibility for AAPI-identifying UArizona faculty on campus. 

 

Dr. Barrios holds a PhD in English from the University of California Los Angeles, a Master of English from the University of California at Irvine, a Master of Education and a BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley.  She has been a veteran educator at LAUSD, where she has served as a public-school teacher for many years in South Los Angeles.

 

Currently Teaching

PAH 260 – Asian Pacific American Cultures in Public Life

From Bruce Lee to Crazy Rich Asians, from General Tso's Chicken to Korean tacos, and from Yuri Kochiyama to Kamala Harris, Asian Pacific American (APA) cultures and public figures have transformed and been transformed by their relationship to other cultures in the United States. We will consider some of these notable examples as models and highlight how they represent public culture, connecting to contemporary debates in the field of Asian Pacific American studies. Course themes will include: the cultural construction of race; representations of APAs in the media; APA gender and sexuality; hybridity and multi-generational diasporas; consumption and APA food culture; politics of the model minority; collective APA action and urban cultures; and the culture of refugees and war. Methods of intercultural competence and public humanities, both key applied humanities approaches to engaging with a globalized world, will be introduced as frames through which these APA Studies themes can be understood and analyzed.

PAH 420 – Innovation and the Human Condition: Learning How to Improve Life in the Community and Beyond

This course will equip students with the skills to use the humanities intellectual and analytical traditions to identify and pursue strategic responses to opportunities for innovation in the human condition. Over the course of the semester, students will draw on a range of humanities-based ways of seeing and doing to: 1) identify opportunities for improving the human condition at the community level and beyond; 2) analyze the cultural, political, and economic conditions that influence such opportunities; 3) design technological, industrial, and socio-cultural innovations that are directly responsive to these opportunities; and 4) develop strategic storylines that effectively convey the merits of these innovations to relevant stakeholders.

We will begin by forming small teams of student innovators. Each team will engage, experience, and internalize the course content through a series of activities and tasks that include: 1) identifying a community-based issue or opportunity that warrants an intervention; 2) analyzing the issue or opportunity through secondary research; 3) formulating an innovative strategy that is data-driven and based in the principles and concepts central to the humanities intellectual and analytical traditions; 4) refining and enhancing said innovative strategy through primary research; and 4) developing and delivering a multi-faceted presentation (visual, oral, written) of the strategy to a panel of experts.

PAH 498H – Public and Applied Humanities Honors Thesis

Students must contact the faculty member with whom they would like to pursue a thesis with well before the beginning of the semester. The student must work with the Instructor to design a thesis.