Asian American Education Literature Before and After Covid-19

Asian Americans have been stereotyped as “model minorities” and occupy a precarious racial position in U.S. racial hierarchy. At times in U.S. history, Asian Americans are touted as success stories of U.S. meritocracy; however, Asian American valorization often depends on broader social contexts. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its origins in China also came a wave of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. This shift in Asian American positionality became a focal point to scholars across fields and broadly shifted the discourse on Asian American issues. This study uses Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) to build two models which thematically show differences across the literature before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first model focuses on Asian American issues, such as the perpetual foreigner and the model minority, and shows after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; research focused much more on discrimination. The second model shows the relationship between Asian Americans and broader racial groups such as Black, Latinx, and White U.S. citizens, and found that before COVID-19, there was more discussion about the relationship between Black and Asian Americans; however, after the onset of COVID-19, there was a shift to White and Asian Americans.