My own paper will focus on attempts by the Chinatown community in Philadelphia to preserve and represent their history in the last ten years. In particular, I am interested in the dilemmas surrounding the desire to preserve a decaying past landscape while addressing competing needs for change and economic development in a community that continues to serve as a destination for new immigrants, and the tensions between a complicated collective history of community activism and the often time-less and essentializing representations of ethnic culture and heritage in local tourism.

Topics might include:
• Representation of immigrants at historic sites
• Ethnic specific museums and sites
• Challenges or case studies concerning the inclusion of immigrants and ethnic communities in public history institutions
• Grass roots preservation or interpretation efforts in immigrant/ethnic communities
• Meta narratives of immigrants in popular history and culture
• Preservation challenges in ethnic neighborhoods
• Creative programmatic approaches to immigrant/ethnic history
• Tensions between history and heritage in immigrant/ethnic representation
• Connections between historical representation and policy in the public sphere

Feel free to suggest something!

If you are interested, please contact me with a description of your paper at kewilson@gsu.edu by February 25, 2013.