Radical History of SF Chinatown: Designing a Digital Tour

• Fulfills the Humanities Studio Requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities.
• Enrollment by approval of instructor. Application deadline Nov. 6. Instructor will review all applications and students will be admitted on a rolling basis. Questions? Email Prof. Siu at lok.siu@berkeley.edu Apply here.

This project-based course explores San Francisco’s Chinatown as the site of Asian American civil rights activism with the goal of developing a conceptual blueprint for an interactive online tour of SF Chinatown. Students will read historical and ethnographic accounts, conduct interviews with community leaders, visit community organizations, go on a walking tour, map and visually document culturally and politically significant sites in Chinatown. Upon completing this research, students will conceptualize and create an interactive digital tour of SF Chinatown that can be expanded and deepen over time.

The central goal of this project is to use humanistic methods of interviewing, photographing, story-telling, video-graphing, combined with digital mapping, to produce an interactive tour that allows “visitors” to gain deeper insight into the political struggles that have made Chinatown what it is today. The spatial formation and shifting boundaries of SF Chinatown, the variation of architectural aesthetics, and the placement of community centers and organizations all provide opportunities to uncover the hidden challenges the community has faced, the negotiations they have made, and the struggles they have launched. Without contest, SF Chinatown has been the hub of Asian American activism and civil rights mobilization. It is the cultural-political center where Asian Americans have organized against anti-Asian violence since the Chinese exclusion era, advocated for racial desegregation and bilingual education, and built a social infrastructure to serve its vulnerable populations. In short, this project takes the emblematic site of SF Chinatown to examine the politics of place-making for Asian Americans. Students will work with the Chinese Historical Society of America as a Community Partner.