Community Screening & Dialogue: Rising Against Asian Hate
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Allendale Campus
Alumni, Community, Faculty, Staff, Students
Join us for a community screening of the 2022 PBS documentary “Rising Against Asian Hate: One Day in March” followed by a panel discussion. This documentary focuses on the Atlanta Spa Shootings which occurred 5 years ago on March 16th, 2021. This tragic event involved the loss of eight lives, six of them Asian women, at three spa and massage businesses in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. This event will revisit and remember the Atlanta Spa Shootings as an opportunity for faculty, staff, students, and community members to reflect and dialogue about violence against marginalized communities. The panelists include Dr. Kimberly McKee, Dr. Katie Bozek, & Dr. Anna Pegler-Gordon, moderated by Dr. Samuel Yoon. This event will include snacks and beverages. Please register via the QR code on the poster or the link below.
Event Registration Link: tinyurl.com/AgainstAsianHate
Speaker Bios:
Dr. Kimberly D. McKee
Kimberly D. McKee is professor and director of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University. She is the author of Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood (The Ohio State University Press, 2023) and Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019), as well as the co-editor of Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Her interdisciplinary scholarship critically interrogates the ways transnational adoption calls attention to and intervenes in discourses concerning citizenship, kinship, multiculturalism through an analysis of literature, film, and television. She is attentive to the ways dominant narratives of adoption and kinship circulate in popular culture and inform societal perceptions of adoptees and their realities.
Dr. Katie Bozek
Dr. Katie Bozek is a licensed marriage and family therapist serving individuals, couples, and families throughout the greater Grand Rapids area. With a commitment to compassionate, client-centered care, she provides mental health services that foster insight, resilience, and meaningful growth. Her clinical work centers on creating safe, supportive spaces where clients can thoughtfully explore their identities, relationships, and lived experiences. Since 2018, Dr. Bozek has served as the first Korean adoptee Executive Director of the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network. In this role, she provides leadership and advocacy for adoptees and adoptive families, advancing dialogue, education, and community-building initiatives. Her work bridges clinical practice and community engagement, emphasizing the importance of understanding both how individuals see themselves and how they are perceived by the world around them.
Dr. Anna Pegler-Gordon
Anna Pegler-Gordon teaches courses in Asian American history, immigration history and immigration and citizenship policy at the James Madison College of Michigan State University. She is also the Director of MSU’s Asian Pacific American Studies Program. Pegler-Gordon’s award-winning research has explored the history of photographic identity documentation in the development of U.S. immigration policy. Her second book project explored the hidden history of Ellis Island as a detention and deportation center for Asian New Yorkers. She is currently working on two new scholarly projects: understanding the ways in which Wong Kim Ark was policed by immigration authorities, even as his landmark 1898 U.S. Supreme Court case secured birthright citizenship for individuals born in the United States; and, uncovering the histories of Japanese American resistance outside of confinement camps during World War II.
Dr. Samuel Yoon
Samuel Yoon is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University. He teaches courses across the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Integrative Studies Program, & East Asian Studies Program. His current manuscript, Cruelty Counts: Anti-Asian Violence and Its Queer Afterlives, explores how queer Asian/American visual and performance cultures confront and reimagine dominant ways of documenting anti-Asian violence. His research on anti-Asian violence and the Atlanta Spa Shootings has been published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas and the Amerasia Journal.
Location Information
Room 2263, Kirkhof Center, Allendale, MI 39401.
Download parking map for the Allendale Campus
Contact Information
Hosting Department, Organization, or Business
School of Interdisciplinary Studies
Tags
academic activism asian asianstudentachievementprogram documentary film food gender integrative multicultural
Share this event
This event was added to the calendar by Samuel Yoon (yoons@gvsu.edu) on Wednesday, February 18, 2026 and was last updated on Friday, February 20, 2026 at 2:32 p.m.
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