Laura Kina, 39, is half Asian-American and half white. Her husband is Jewish, and her stepdaughter is half Hispanic. Her family, including her fair-skinned, blue-eyed biological daughter, lives near Devon Avenue in the heart of Chicago's Indian and Pakistani community.

Kina, who's a DePaul University associate professor of art, media and design, views her life as a vibrant collage of culture, religion and race, pieced together by chance and choice.

"I grew up in the 'Sesame Street' generation," she said. "This is just my normal."

On Thursday, Kina and DePaul professor Camilla Fojas will begin a four-day conference on campus that explores the emerging academic field of critical mixed-race studies. Hundreds of scholars and artists from around the country and globe are expected to participate in research presentations, spoken-word performances and discussions.

Kina and Fojas, who hosted a similar conference in 2010, hope to cover an array of topics on identity, discrimination and racial "passing." Additionally, panels will tackle issues such as the role of the mixed-race person as exotic "everyman" in advertising and film, and the impact of President Barack Obama and Tiger Woods, among others, as biracial icons.

Some of these topics have been picked apart for decades by scholars in, for example, African-American studies programs. What's fresh about this conference is that its organizers are pushing beyond the black-white biracial experience that traditionally has captured the spotlight in this country. They're also expanding the discussion to include what it means to be mixed-race in nations around the world. (Learn more at tinyurl.com/c4c5zgz.)

In America, the subject continues to gain relevance as this country becomes browner. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, 9 million people — or 2.9 percent of the population — identify themselves as belonging to more than one race. That's up about 32 percent since the 2000 Census.

One of the goals of the DePaul conference is to get people to stop thinking about race as immutable and fixed.

Fojas, 41, who's half white and half Asian, said that while growing up in Hawaii people assumed she was "hapa," or half Asian. But when her family moved to California, she was often asked, "What's your nationality?"

"I would say, 'I'm an American, but what you're really asking is my racial or ethnic background,'" said Fojas, a professor of Latin American and Latino studies. "It was confusing because I have a Spanish surname, and in Chicago that's what people think I am." (Her surname comes from her father, who is from the Philippines, which was conquered long ago by the Spanish.)

Fojas and Kina said they want to shift the discussion beyond the individual experiences of mixed-raced people to broader contexts, such as the various forces that have brought people of different races, cultures and religions together.

"My parents met at Seattle Pacific University," Kina said. "My dad (who's of Japanese ancestry) was born and raised on a sugar plantation in Hawaii, and he wanted to go to college at a time when that was unheard of for someone of a working-class background.

"He had access to go through higher-education laws that were passed that helped minorities afford college. That opened the door for him to meet my mother."

Wars have also brought people together and led to their intermarriage. Last week, a university in Osaka, Japan, hosted "Mixed Roots Japan: Towards a Japan Model of a Multicultural Society," a third academic conference on the subject.

"In Okinawa, you have a lot of children who are the offspring from U.S. military personnel," Kina said. "They are black and Japanese, and white and Japanese. Some of the mothers and kids would leave Japan to live with their fathers, but if it didn't work out they would return to Japan and just wouldn't have the language skills.

"Since World War II, people have been trying to figure out what to do with mixed-raced individuals in Japan."

Kina is a studio artist who also teaches Asian-American studies at DePaul. She's the co-editor of the upcoming book "War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art," a collection featuring contemporary artwork and essays on war, racial mixing and, among other things, Chinese labor migration.

"With one artist, both of his parents were half Afro-Jamaican and half Chinese," Kina said. "The Chinese were brought to Jamaica (by the British beginning in the mid-19th century) to work in the sugar cane fields. This is nothing new, but who's writing about it?"

Also in the book is a piece on the descendants of Chinese-immigrant merchants and blacks in the South who intermarried after emancipation.

Minelle Mahtani is an associate professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough who will present research at the conference. She said mixed-raced ancestry is an "exploding issue" in the academic and nonprofit worlds in Canada.

"Notions of mixing in Canada go way beyond people of British and French descent," she said. "I'm Indian and Iranian as well as Muslim and Hindu. You have the mixing of the races, cultures and religions."

I think these discussions are important because they help coax people out of their straitjackety notions of race.

"There's no genetic marker for race," Fojas said. "But we're so invested in the idea of race as a fixed construct. We want to know what will happen if we look at this critically, and the best people to do it are people who don't fit neatly into any of the categories."

dtrice@tribune.com