We are pleased to introduce the two new papers in our New Voices in Asian Research paper series. Harkit Bhandal and Safa Warsi are the 2019 recipients of the Undergraduate Asia and Undergraduate Asian Diaspora Essay Awards. The award-winning papers are published annually in this special series.

Safa Warsi is author of a study that considers the Model Minority Stereotype (MMS), which depicts Asians as scoring high in certain seemingly positive attributes (e.g., competence and achievement), whilst also scoring high in seemingly negative traits (e.g., unsociability and emotional reservation). Previous research on this topic has largely focused on East Asian American samples, finding that internalization of the MMS can have psychologically harmful effects on these individuals. Safa, who recently completed a degree in Psychology, employed qualitative and quantitative methods to explore whether or not the MMS exists in South Asian Canadian populations. Her essay—Views on the Model Minority Stereotype in a South Asian Canadian Context—can be access here: https://yorku.ca/research/ycar/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/nvar0302.pdf. 
 
Harkit Bhandal’s essay—Understandings of Military Power, Intoxication and Love in Kashmir, India—considers how patients at the Drug De-addiction Centre in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir reconfigure their relationship to substance abuse through the performance of alternate narratives that are embedded with understandings of romantic love, Sufi thought and nasha (intoxication) to resist the clinic’s ‘recovery’ techniques linked to the structures of military rule. Read Harkit’s paper at: https://yorku.ca/research/ycar/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/nvar0301.pdf.
 
Earlier issues in the New Voices in Asian Research series are available at: https://yorku.ca/research/ycar/new-voices-in-asian-research/.