From BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY
The Institute for the Study of Culture & Society (ICS) at Bowling Green State University invites the community to attend the Spring 2026 ICS Faculty Fellowship Talk by Dr. Rebecca Kinney. Her talk will highlight the experiences of one of the largest and simultaneously least known cohorts of the Korean diaspora: Korean adoptees from the U.S. Midwest. It also supports a community collaboration with the young adult volunteers and counselors of Asian Adoptee Summer Camp in Avon, Ohio.
By placing the experiences of Korean adoptees who were transnationally and transracially adopted to white families in the Midwest alongside existing conversations on regional racial formation of Asian Americans in the Midwest, this project shows that the idea of home is complex and can change over time, rather than being fixed in one place.
The talk will take place on Thursday, March 26, from 6:30 – 8 p.m., at the Way Public Library, 101 E. Indiana Ave., Perrysburg.
Kinney is an associate professor of American culture and ethnic studies at BGSU and a Fulbright scholar. She is the author of “Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt (2025).” In this book, she challenges ideas about the invisibility of Asian Americans in the urban Midwest by linking the contemporary development of Cleveland’s “AsiaTown” to the multiple and fragmented histories of Cleveland’s Asian American communities from the 1940s to present day.
The ICS is an interdisciplinary, public humanities center at BGSU founded in 1996. ICS helps faculty to develop, communicate, and disseminate their scholarly and creative work to constituencies across campus and throughout the region. With its public events and outreach efforts, ICS brings issues of national and global importance to northwest Ohio and, in turn, brings community knowledge back to the university.
This event is free and open to the public. The Way Public Library is an accessible venue.
For more information, follow ICS on Facebook and Instagram, @icsbgsu, or visit www.bgsu.edu/ics.
