The journal Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, invites submissions for: 

Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage  

Guest Editors: Gail Dubrow and Kecia Fong 

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been integral to the growth, expansion, and cultural vibrancy of the United States for more than 150 years, and yet their contributions remain largely invisible in the cultural landscapes and built environments of US national heritage.¹ Laborers, innovators, artists, businesspeople, politicians, community leaders, educators, neighbours, and friends, their struggles and accomplishments reflect the enduring contradictions of US policy and society regarding who is an American. Despite their civic commitments and sacrifices, they have long been perceived as perpetual foreigners. This historical bias skews the narrative of the US and obscures its global legacy of colonialism. How do you make a case for preserving a history that, through exclusion, is nearly universally absent? Acknowledging places, sites, and events of AAPI heritage in the built environment is a cultural justice issue and a method of societal repair.  

This issue of Change Over Time on “Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage” invites insights from scholarship, professional practice, advocacy, and lived experience to stimulate a more robust public conversation about the future of conserving AAPI heritage in the built environment. We welcome contributions that ask hard questions and point in fresh directions with a goal of accelerating cultural justice. To that end, we seek to include a broad spectrum of AAPI heritage, from sites of celebration and joy to sites of resistance in the struggle for equal rights. Questions to consider are:  

• How might the tools of different disciplines such as conservation, public history, anthropology, design, planning, and others be utilized to interrogate dominant historical narratives and reinterpret AAPI heritage contributions to American, Asian, and Pacific Islander indigenous and diasporic histories?  

• Where and what in the built environment, both in the US and transnational geographies, are the under-acknowledged AAPI contributions to the arc of US and global history?  
• How have US anti-Asian immigrant policies and practices or dispossession of Pacific Islander sovereignties shaped perceptions of AAPI heritage sites?  
• How do AAPI transnational identities and relationships to place inform their heritage and guide its conservation?  

We are particularly interested in illuminating sites of AAPI resilience in the face of anti-Asian and Pacific Islander racism, along with works that link the past with contemporary concerns.  

Abstracts of 200-300 words are due 31 May 2023. Notifications and invitations for manuscript development will be sent by late June 2023. Final manuscript submissions will be due November 2023.   

Submission  

Change Over Time welcomes submissions from scholars, practitioners, and artists whose work brings a critical perspective to the selected issue theme. After approval of a short abstract, manuscript submissions can take a variety of forms including:  

• Provocations (1,000 – 1,500 words)  

• Short case studies (4,000 – 5,000 words)  
• Articles (5,000 – 7,500 words, maximum 10 images)  
• Photo essays (15 images and captions)  
• Interviews/Profiles (3,000 – 5,000 words)  
• Literature reviews (3,00 – 5000 words) 

• Translations into English of key theoretical proposals critical to conservation discourse 

Articles are generally restricted to 7,500 or fewer words and may include up to ten images. See Author Guidelines for full details at cotjournal.com, or email Editor, Kecia Fong at cot@design.upenn.edu for further information.