Migration expert Jane Pak kicks off the library’s new Community Speaker Series

By Marielle Argueza

Supported by an anonymous donation, the Tanimura & Antle Family Memorial Library at California State University Monterey Bay is launching the new Community Speaker Series.

It will begin 4:30pm Friday, Feb. 3, with Dr. Jane Pak — an adjunct professor in the Master in the Migration Studies program at the University of San Francisco, and co-executive director of Refugee and Immigrant Transitions, or RIT — speaking on the topic “Centering Refugee and Immigrant ‘Living Knowledges’ for Systems Change and Community Thrivance.”

The anonymous donor, according to CSUMB’s Interim Dean of the Library, Jacqueline Grallo, “has an interest in the politics of migration and displacement.” Thus, the series will bring one speaker each year, for the next four years, to talk about related policies and practices.

“We were really excited when we got the donation,” said Grallo, adding that the phenomenon isn’t a distant problem but one that’s relevant to CSUMB. “Migration and displacement are experiences some of our very own students have had.”

“Initially the library was thinking of bringing someone to talk about the war in the Ukraine because it’s very topical. But when Grallo went to her various advisors, she was inspired to go search deeper.

“One of our officers rightly pointed out that often in these conversations, or in the media, it’s non-white voices and perspectives who are not heard or seen,” she said. 

With her mission readjusted, she came up with another shortlist, and landed on someone who had also been working most of her professional life to center marginalized voices in refugee communities: Dr. Jane Pak.

Pak understands what words and images might be associated with the word “refugee.” In addition to her positions at UCSF and RIT, she is also the daughter of parents who fled from North Korea.

She contends with headlines that often couple the word “crisis” to refugee, accompanied by graphic and harrowing images of people scrambling to pile into tiny boats, families bundled up trudging through harsh winters, or masses of people walking long journeys only to be met with heavily armed border patrol.

“That’s the standard narrative,” says Pak. But it doesn’t paint a complete picture. Quoting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous TED Talk, she likens basing policies and research off of a narrow set of images and headlines as “not false, but partial.” In her Library Speaker Series talk, she will explain the idea of “community research practice.”

In many traditional research practices, institutions are often extractive in their questioning and observation. But as Pak will extrapolate in her talk, there is a deeper and more humanizing way to go about researching and thus informing policies when it comes to displaced people.

“Not all community knowledges may be seen or captured by outsider researchers. Nor are all knowledges meant to be captured,” Pak says. “However, for those that are, the community research practice aims to situate community members and practitioners as knowledge holders to identify and inform inquiries that affect their own lives.”

Dr. Jane Pak’s talk is 4:30-6:30pm Friday, Feb. 3, at auditorium 1188 at the Tanimura & Antle Family Memorial Library. RSVP here.