About

Rick Bonus is primarily a professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, earned in 1997. His academic interests include the intersections among ethnic studies, American studies, Pacific Islander Studies, and Southeast Asian studies, with a focus on migration, transnationalism, interdisciplinary work, and multicultural pedagogy. Bonus's research explores the cultural politics of difference, media representations, and multicultural education, emphasizing the experiences of Filipino Americans and Pacific Islanders. He is the author of several influential works, including 'Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space' and 'The Ocean in the School: Pacific Islander Students Transforming Their University.' Bonus has also co-edited anthologies such as 'Intersections and Divergences: Contemporary Asian American Communities' and 'Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation.' He teaches courses on U.S. multiracial society, Filipino American history and culture, ethnographies of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian America, and education related to race. Additionally, Bonus has been actively involved in mentorship programs targeting underrepresented students, advocacy for underrepresented faculty, curriculum transformation, and community linkages. He has served as president of the Association for Asian American Studies and is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Asian American Studies and ALON: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Criminology
• Law
• Oceanography
• History
• Anthropology
• Geology
• Geography

Selected publications

• Editor's Preface

  Alon Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies · 2023-03-27

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Editor's Preface

  Alon Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies · 2022-07-12

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Addressing The Interlocking Impact Of Colonialism And Racism On Filipinx/a/o American Health Inequities

  Health Affairs · 2022 · 39 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  Within the monolithic racial category of “Asian American,” health determinants are often hidden within each subgroup’s complex histories of indigeneity, colonialism, migration, culture, and socio-political systems. Although racism is typically framed to underscore the ways in which various institutions (for example, employment and education) disproportionately disadvantage Black/Latinx communities over White people, what does structural racism look like among Filipinx/a/o Americans (FilAms), the third-largest Asian American group in the US? We argue that racism defines who is visible. We discuss pathways through which colonialism and racism preserve inequities for FilAms, a large and overlooked Asian American subgroup. We bring to light historical and modern practices inhibiting progress toward dismantling systemic racial barriers that impinge on FilAm health. We encourage multilevel strategies that focus on and invest in FilAms, such as robust accounting of demographic data in heterogeneous populations, explicitly naming neocolonial forces that devalue and neglect FilAms, and structurally supporting community approaches to promote better self- and community care.

  PublisherDOI

• Filipinx American Critique: An Introduction

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-06-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Filipinx American Critique: An Introduction

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-04-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  What is Filipinx American studies? What does it mean to think, write, speak about, and act upon it? How is it configured? What are its critical interventions? Fundamentally, what does it aim to transform? The thirty-four essays in this volume collectively engage these questions from the purviews of each of our contributors’ particular disciplines, subjects of interest, and relevant experiences to perform a kind of accounting or a mode of chronicling a field of inquiry—an <italic>interdiscipline</italic>—that they participate in. Taken as a whole, this anthology is an aggregate expression of what we conceive Filipinx American studies is about, a kind of intellectual tapestry that defines the field’s collective engagement with its histories, contemporary realities, and futures—a reckoning, a reclamation, and a transformation. So, through such a set of engagements, we collectively propose that while Filipinx American studies is indeed a product of a historical struggle to mark as well as circumscribe its subjects’ relationships to their colonial and imperial past, it is also a continuing project to align its intellectual knowledge production with the pursuit of social <italic>transformation</italic> within and beyond its boundaries.

  PublisherDOI

• Editor's Preface

  Alon Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies · 2022-03-23

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Filipinx American Critique:

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-06-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Navigating the Ocean in the School

  positions asia critique · 2021-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article engages with practices of ethnographic storytelling to perform a structural critique of US schooling from the perspectives of Pacific Islander students attending a university far from their ancestral homelands. Deploying indigeneity to comprehend how their schooling is meaningfully connected to their histories of imperial colonization and their resistances to it, these students’ specific understandings of the ocean enable them to transform the very school that alienates them and causes them to fail. These students reveal in their stories their consideration of the ocean as a representation and a repository of Pacific Islander cultural practices—such as collective support, mentorship through partnership, and caring for the family and church—that enable them to navigate through the struggles they face as minorities in their school.

  PublisherDOI

• Asia. Colonialism and male domestic service across the Asia Pacific By Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel, and Victoria Haskins London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 223, Map, Illustrations, Table, Bibliography, Index.

  Journal of Southeast Asian Studies · 2021-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Asia. Colonialism and male domestic service across the Asia Pacific By Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel, and Victoria Haskins London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 223, Map, Illustrations, Table, Bibliography, Index. - Volume 52 Issue 1

  PublisherDOI

• Editor's Preface

  Alon Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies · 2021-07-19

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Antonio T. Tiongson

  3 shared

• Jake Ryann C. Sumibcay

  Harvard University

  1 shared

• Linda Trinh Võ

  1 shared

• Ninez A. Ponce

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• UW Aas Students

  1 shared

• Erin Manalo-Pedro

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Claire Valderama‐Wallace

  California State University, East Bay

  1 shared

• Catherine Ceniza Choy

  1 shared