Navigating Expectations, Negotiating Well-Being: Racialized Discourse on Asian Diasporic Youth and Well-Being

Abstract

Asian diasporic youth in U.S. schools are frequently positioned through racialized narratives of academic success, behavioral compliance, and self-sufficiency, constructions that render their well-being through narrow terms of achievement and goodness. When schools equate doing well with being well, the structural conditions producing unwellness for Asian diasporic youth become not simply overlooked, but difficult to perceive in the first place. This dissertation examines how racialized expectations shape the experience, recognition, and institutional visibility of Asian diasporic youth in Washington State through a multi-method design spanning three interrelated articles. Article 1 develops the dissertation’s conceptual foundation by drawing on Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit) and Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) to theorize how racism and ableism position Asian diasporic youth as educational model minorities. It argues that “smartness” and “goodness” operate as organizing logics through which unwellness is both produced and obscured. Using composite vignettes grounded in qualitative data, the article illuminates how Asian diasporic youth become hypervisible as evidence that educational systems work while remaining invisible as youth in need of care. Article 2 draws on focus groups with Asian diasporic high school youth across Washington State to examine how racialized expectations take spatial form. Using the concept of spatialized expectations, the analysis traces how institutional logics and racial scripts shape where youth are positioned in school, how they are perceived, and which versions of themselves are deemed acceptable. Findings reveal how external expectations migrate inward through self-surveillance, masking, and compartmentalization, producing fragmentation not as individual deficit but as an outcome of schooling ecologies organized around narrow ideals of “smartness” and “goodness”. Article 3 uses secondary-data analysis of the 2023 Washington State Healthy Youth Survey to examine anxiety, hope, and identity-based harm among Asian and non-Asian youth. Although Asian youth reported slightly lower anxiety and higher hope than non-Asian peers, they also reported significantly greater exposure to unfair race-based treatment; this unfair treatment was nearly three times more strongly associated with anxiety for Asian youth than for non-Asian youth, and descriptive analyses across Asian ethnicities revealed substantial within-group heterogeneity obscured by pan-ethnic aggregation. The three articles argue that Asian diasporic youth well-being cannot be understood through individualized or decontextualized frameworks. Instead, well-being must be situated within the racialized and ableist conditions that shape recognition, belonging, and care in schools, conditions that too often position Asian diasporic youth invisible when support is most needed.