Jeannie Shinozuka

Washington State University

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Research Fellow

Model Minority Intelligence: Race, Education, & Citizenship, 1910-1965

As the recent 2023 US Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, has shown, Asian American students have played a central role in shaping affirmative action policies, standardized testing, and eugenic racism. The book manuscript is on the relational racial construction of Asian American and African American students at the height of eugenics and intelligence testing in the early twentieth century in order to better understand the interrelationship between education, eugenic racism, and citizenship. The development of Lewis Terman’s 1916 Stanford-Binet intelligence test came at a time when people of color were increasingly viewed as problems that must be addressed—including the question of education and its ties to psychology, criminality, and immigration.

Updates

Jeannie Shinozuka

Jeannie's book, Biotic Borders, has been published with the University of Chicago Press (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo131341992.html).

Biotic Borders charts the co-production of race and species over half a century in the human and more-than-human worlds, focusing on Japanese plant, insect, and human immigrants across the Pacific Ocean. Situating plants and insects as important actors in histories of the United States empire and a hemispheric context enables the recentering of more-than-human worlds that have enriched understandings of transpacific racisms in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, Hawai‘i, and Latin America. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials targeted Japanese plant, insect, and human immigrants for fear of San José scale, chestnut blight, citrus canker, the Oriental termite, the Japanese beetle, and other invasions.

Jeannie Shinozuka

Shinozuka has recently been granted a 2014-2016 Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She published an article on Japanese beetles and Japanese immigrant gardeners in the December 2013 issue of American Quarterly.