In Fall semester 2025, Denise Khor, Reckonings Project Faculty and Associate Director of Global Asian Studies, taught the service learning course “Asian American Cinemas.”

“We’re so lucky that we have the longest standing Asian American Film Festival in the region right here in Boston,” Khor says. “We do research into the films, into the directors, and how they are part of this broader history of Asian American filmmaking. Throughout the semester we explore how community archiving practices are central to understanding this history. Each October, students in the course attend the festival, where they view films, engage in conversations with directors, and gain firsthand insight into the production, circulation, and exhibition of independent Asian American media.”

Khor’s class of twenty created a timeline, tracing Asian American Resource Workshop’s (AARW) rich history of media activism and grassroots organizing—from its earliest experiments with community-based media and organizing in 1979, to the founding of the Boston Asian American Film Festival (BAAFF) in 2005.

Students learn how to conduct archival research in the AARW collection in the Northeastern Archives and Special Collections, which stewards information going back to the origins of the organization. Students drew on a wide range of historical materials to populate the timeline, including event flyers, film program notes, and organizational meeting minutes. Alongside these archival documents, the project also highlights works that foreground the design practices and creative labor of Asian American artists. These include self-authored comic books, screen-printed posters for community events, and richly illustrated, independently produced calendars featuring Asian American history and culture.

Gregory Lord, Reckonings Assistant Director of Design & Program Manager, conducted several workshops for the students on Timeline JS, a data visualization tool used to create the timeline, and on Omeka S, a digital archiving and exhibit tool.

“It was a chance to put into practice some of the multimedia workflows that we have around community archiving work with open-source platforms,” says Lord. “And to make that a kind of shareable learning resource for folks in the future as well.”

Student Benjamin Yu, third-year politics, philosophy, and economics major, said his favorite part of the course was the timeline project. Yu’s entry highlights a 1982 AARW workshop held in Cambridge, where audiences viewed videotaped testimonies of former Japanese American internees that had been submitted to Congress during the pivotal hearings on redress and reparations. These first-hand accounts contributed to the political momentum that would eventually lead to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

The collaborative nature of the project was a major part of the experience. “Everybody uploaded their own part into the timeline and seeing it come together was super cool,” said Yu.

Khor agreed.

“Part of the learning is to see it in aggregate. It illustrates the truest spirit of independent Asian American filmmaking, like the final project being this collaborative project. And so it’s just such a wonderful experience.”

This collaboration between the Reckonings Project, Professor Khor, students, and AARW is one example of how academia and community can meet to preserve history and reimagine its possibilities.