Thank you for taking the time to visit my website! Here, you can find information about my scholarship, teaching, and contact information.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University. My research focus lies at the intersections of Asian American studies, cultural studies, rhetorical theory, and media studies. I received my Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh. I also hold an M.A. in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. in Politics & International Affairs and Religious Studies from Wake Forest University.
My book project, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press and explores Asian Americans, narrative, and notions of animacy/inanimacy in the racialized construction of the human (see below). Outside of this project, my research interests also include discourses of false inclusion, comparative racialization, the Asian American movement, and transpacific race relations in Japan. I have published in journals across disciplines including Lateral, Liminalities, and Western Journal of Communication. In addition to these scholarly interests, I teach undergraduate courses in communication, including COMM 350: Politics of Social Memory, COMM 430: Intersectional Communication, and COMM 420: Critical/Cultural Communication. I am interested in continuing to develop pedagogical practices that engage students in creative ways to think about power, oppression, resistance, and communication.
Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans
Forthcoming November 2024
Rutgers University Press, Asian American Studies Today Series
From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.