AASA Listen to the Silence Conference 2026

AASA’s annual conference unites on- and off-campus communities through dialogue, shared AAPI experiences, and action.

In recent years, growing division across our country and communities has made it easy to lose sight of our shared desire for a more inclusive future. To listen to the silence is to notice what has long gone unspoken—within ourselves, our communities, and our histories—and to give it a shared voice.

This year, AASA’s Listen to the Silence (LTS) 2026 conference centers on this theme: A Grain of Sand — Discovering Ourselves Through Deepened Community.

Inspired by the 1973 album A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America, created by Chris Iijima, Nobuko Miyamoto, and Charlie Chin—the first Asian American music album—it links self-identity to collective community and solidarity among diverse Asian communities in the U.S. at a time of shared struggle against racism, imperialism, and marginalization.

In this spirit, the conference creates a space on campus for dynamic and diverse communities to come together. Before engaging in meaningful activism, we rediscover the importance of being good to one another as humans— as small, yet persistent grains that in gathering, create friction, transformation, and change, like a grain of sand forming a pearl within an oyster.