Kale Fajardo

Kale B. Fajardo is an associate professor of Asian American studies and American studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is the author of Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities and Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011; and reprinted by the University of the Philippines Press, 2013). He is a Co-Editor (with Martin F. Manalansan IV and Alice Y. Hom) of Q + A: Queer Voices in North America (forthcoming from Temple University Press.) Fajardo has been published in journals and anthologies such as "GLQ," "Mains'l Haul," Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity; and The Transgender Reader 2, among others. His essay "Aquapelagic Malolos: Island-Water Imaginaries in Coastal Bulacan (Philippines)" will be published in Hydrohumanities: Transforming Currents for Uncertain Futures, edited by Kim De Wolff, Rina C. Faletti, and Ignacio Calvo-López (forthcoming from the University of California Press), while his essay, "In an Archipelago and Sea of Complexities: Contemporary Intersectional/TransPacific/Decolonial Queer and/or Trans Filipinx American Studies" will be published in The Critical Filipinx Studies Reader, edited by Rick Bonus and Antonio Tiongson, (also forthcoming from Temple).

Fajardo is currently working on his second book entitled, Another Archipelago: Migrant Masculinities, Photography and Place from St. Malo to Portland. In this project, he is analyzing the cultural politics of migrant Filipinx masculinities–imagined and often devalued and/or marginalized by dominant white social actors and institutions, vis-à-vis the actual lived everyday experiences and practices by migrant Filipinx in the US. In particular, he is interested in the entanglements between Filipiinx migration/ travel/mobilities; race, class, gender, and sexuality; and relevant photography and visual practices in locales such as St. Malo, Louisiana; the Central Valley and Coast of California; Minneapolis and Chicago in the Midwest, and Astoria and Portland in the Pacific Northwest. His research and writing in the book spans the late 19th century to the present.

Fajardo has also begun research and writing for his third book, tentatively titled, Fish Stories. In this project, he is photographing and writing about the entanglements between “Filipinx, fish, and marine ecologies” (historical and contemporary) in the Philippines and US while also engaging with anthropological debates about the “border zones between art and anthropology practices” (Schneider and Wright, 2010). Part of this project includes working with Dr. Elspeth Probyn (University of Sydney [Australia]) in the research project called Selling the Sea: A Comparative Cultural Analysis of Urban Fish Markets, funded by the Australian Research Council. Fajardo will conduct research on fish markets in Manila with Probyn (when it is safe to travel internationally).

At Minnesota, Fajardo teaches undergraduate courses such as: Contemporary Perspectives on Asian America, The US and Global Migration (aka "The US on an Immigrant Planet"), The US in International Perspective: Focus on Ocean Worlds, Critical Perspectives on the American Dream, (US) Americans Abroad, and Comparative Genders and Sexualities, among others. He is also active in the American Studies PhD Program and is accepting graduate student advisees who work in Philippine-American Studies, Filipinx Studies, Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, transnational Asian Studies, Southeast Asian American Studies, Global Studies, queer and/or trans (of color) studies and critique, masculinity studies, and visual anthropology, as well as those who are interested in using ethnographic research methods and/or experimental writing in their scholarship.

Fajardo serves on the Advisory Board for the "Critical Ethnic Studies Journal;" the Race, Indigeneity, Gender and Sexuality (RIGS) Initiative (UMN-TC); the Environmental Humanities Initiative (UMN-TC), and the International Advisory Board for "Lambda Nordica." He is also a Co-Editor at the "Island Studies Journal" and manages submissions related to culture, art, and anthropology.