Students acquire proficiency in the field and area of Asian American Studies. This includes, for example, knowledge based in intersectional, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches. While largely based in an area approach to the United States, Asian American Studies is also deeply concerned with transnational, diasporic, and global studies. Students learn the history of Asian Americans and theories and methods of the social sciences and humanistic approaches to understand the Asian American experience. The conceptual rubrics broadly include migration, social movements, US imperialism and racism, and ideas of citizenship and belonging.

Applying theories in Asian American Studies students develop skills of critical inquiry that draw on intersectional and comparative approaches. As a mode of discovery students exercise their skills using methods of the social sciences and humanities through verbal communication in the classroom and written research projects. Students are asked to apply their critical modes of learning in original and unique projects of discovery through research.

Students study models of community leadership and engagement through the histories of Asian American social movements, political culture, and community activism. Reflection based on these approaches provides a context from which to understand the role of classroom learning and the application of theories of social change in communities.

Students learn the dimensions of intersectional analysis of social, cultural, economic, and political issues concerning the Asian Americans. Social theories of power inform how students are taught to understand a number of categories of analysis including race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion, and disability, to name a few.

Students gain an understanding of the global dimensions of intersectional approaches in a broad range of fields and disciplines including literary, historical, cultural and ethnographic approaches. Through the study of migration and diaspora, the broad understanding of individual and collective dynamics are observed, analyzed, and theorized. Students are also asked to think in terms of a comparative framework to understand how race, gender, and sexuality, for example, are thought of from a number of vantage points.