Knowledge production is the production of knowledge.

Typically, we think of knowledge as something that gets produced at universities by scientists, mathematicians, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, historians, literary scholars, and so on.

But knowledge gets produced all over the place, by all kinds of people.

Because knowledge production is not neutral.

On the contrary, knowledge production (in and beyond the university) is deeply tied to power—which is not only a matter of who has power, but of what they do with that power, including how they advance certain ideas, beliefs, structures, and systems, often to the point that those ideas, beliefs, structures, and systems come to seem natural, as opposed to expressions of power.

I want to talk about knowledge production because I want to clarify how the knowledge that I produce responds to, challenges, and otherwise gets caught up in dynamics of power.

I produce knowledge from my vantage at the intersections of literary and cultural studies, trauma and memory studies, Asian Canadian studies, and Global Asia studies.

I draw on a range of methods—from close reading and archival research, to ethnography, interviews, and oral histories—to explore how Asian Canadian communities remember, represent, and reckon with historical injustice and the complex politics of loss.

Because both my academic training and my personal experience as a racialized woman have taught me that:

• stories are of the utmost importance (hence, literary and cultural studies); that

• pain lasts (hence, trauma and memory studies); and that

• the stories that Asian and Asian Canadian communities tell about their pain, both to one another and to others, matter (hence, Asian Canadian studies and Global Asia studies).

By investigating the stories that Asian and Asian Canadian communities tell about their pain, I am able to produce knowledge that helps to challenge powerful systems, structures, and ideologies (think: capitalism, imperialism, [settler] colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, queerphobia, and so on). I produce knowledge in the ways that I do because I am committed to working against these expressions of power—and for liberation.

For me, “liberation” means reclaiming the very idea of freedom.

My understanding of liberation is shaped by sociologist Avery F. Gordon’s engagement with the work of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in her book, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins. Gordon quotes Marcuse, who insists: “We must accommodate . . . the extreme possibilities for freedom . . . the scandal of the qualitative difference” (63).

The qualitative difference that Marcuse refers to is the difference between freedom as we have been conditioned to think about it, and freedom as we could think of it—beyond, in spite of, and, ultimately, in opposition to many of our existing structures and systems. As Gordon explains, for Marcuse, such a conception of freedom is scandalous because in the context of existing structures and systems, this other freedom—that is, freedom as we could conceive of it—is “everywhere denied as existent or even possible” (63). To think of freedom anew, then—is what liberation means, to me.

I try to undermine dominant forms of knowledge production, even as my work is indebted to – and, inevitably – caught up in them.

To do so, I tend to work along the lines of what Avery Gordon calls haunting.

According to Gordon, haunting is:

• a “language” (Gordon, 2008: xvi),

• an “experiential modality” (xvi),

• a way that “abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life” (xvi),

• “a method of knowledge production” (xvii), and

• “a way of writing” (xvii).

Basically, haunting is a kind of counter-method/ology. It is a way of knowing about the world in ways that many of us are often explicitly trained not to know it. Haunting thus

• involves “a particular kind of social alchemy” (6);

• “draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically” (8);

• reveals “how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence” (8); and

• impels us “toward our own reckoning with how we are in these stories, with how they change us, with our own ghosts” (21–22).

In short, as I argue alongside Drs. Amber Dean and Kara Granzow, haunting is “contingent upon an undermining of dominant forms of knowledge production” (Dean et al.).

In short, I follow the ghosts. I heed the forces that press upon me, and regardless of the kind of work that requires (academic, literary, artistic, collaborative, etc.), I pursue the kind of reckoning that they seem to demand.