Juliann Anesi

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Juliann Anesi is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of California – Los Angeles. Her research interests include disability and indigeneity, educational policies, and decolonial feminisms. As a community educator and activist, she has also worked with non-profit organizations and schools in American Sāmoa, California, Hawai ́i, New York and Sāmoa. Juliann’s work has appeared in venues including Disability and the Global South, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 to 2000; and Disability & Society. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, Tautua: Women’s Disability Activism in Sāmoa.

Thuy Vo Dang

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Thuy Vo Dang (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Information Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from University of California, San Diego and a B.A. in English and Asian American Studies from Scripps College. Her previous role was Curator for the UCI Libraries Southeast Asian Archive and Research Librarian for Asian American Studies. With research and teaching expertise in oral history, Southeast Asian diaspora, community archives, and cultural memory, Thuy brings an interdisciplinary approach to co-creating digital humanities and archival documentation projects with educators and community-based organizations. She is co-author of the books A People’s Guide to Orange County (2022) and Vietnamese in Orange County(2015). Thuy serves on the board of directors for Arts OC and the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association.

Lisa Uperesa

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Associate Professor Lisa Uperesa works with Pacific communities to understand movement and mobility, and how they shape lives, identities, families, cultures, and futures. Her past research focused on the rise of American football in Samoan communities and the navigation of sport as both labor and tautua (service). Current research projects include the globalization of Māori haka through sporting routes and digital platforms, Native mascots in Indigenous and multi-ethnic communities, decolonial and culturally sustaining pedagogies, and mapping Pacific Research Methodologies. She previously served as Head of Pacific Studies and co-Head of School Te Wānanga o Waipapa | School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland. She has also had teaching and research appointments in ethnic studies and sociology at University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa; and in anthropology at Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, and Hoftstra University. She holds the Morgan and Helen Chu Endowed Chair in Asian American Studies and is proud to return to the University of California.

Neelanjana Banerjee

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Neelanjana Banerjee is an expert in Asian American arts, and Asian Pacific American and Asian diasporic literature. In 20 plus years of work in mainstream and independent journalism, youth development work, Asian American arts, copywriting, and editing, she has honed her strengths as a communicator across various platforms. Banerjee’s journalism, fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely in publications like Harper’s Bazaar, The Texas Observer, World Literature Today, Prairie Schooner, and more. She is the co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Literature (University of Arkansas Press), the first of its kind; along with The Coiled Serpent, a collection of Southern California poets from Tia Chucha Press. She is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, a 30-year-old independent publishing house dedicated to Asian Pacific American and Asian diasporic literature. Banerjee teaches Creative Writing and Publishing at UCLA, and other Southern California universities.

Soo Mee Kim

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Albert Kochaphum

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Albert Sitipong Kochaphum holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree from UCLA and a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from San Francisco State University. From 2014 to 2021, he served as the Campus GIS Coordinator at UCLA, working on various research groups such as the Million Dollar Hoods, UCLA Hate Crime Map, and the Mapping Asian American Political Potential project. He currently works at Los Angeles Metro, focusing on open data and real-time transit mapping projects.

Kochaphum currently volunteers as the Academic Lead for the United Nations Smart Maps group. He has also previously volunteered with organizations like StreetsForAll, creating a bot to tweet about traffic accidents.

Since 2021, he has been teaching courses on Web Development and GIS for Social Change. Kochaphum has been a speaker at the FOSS4G North America conference, the premier open geospatial technology and business conference, and the FOSS4G Asia 2023 conference in Seoul, Korea, which aimed to support the UN sustainable development goals agenda.

Drawing from his academic and civic engagement work, Kochaphum also works as an indie game developer, focusing on solar punk and post-capitalist games.

Nour Joudah

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Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA (2022), and wrote her dissertation Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine on the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures while centering indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Her work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and occupied Palestine.

Loubna Qutami

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Loubna Qutami is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Qutami is a former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2018-2020) and received her PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside (2018). Qutami’s research examines transnational Palestinian youth movements after the 1993 Oslo Accords through the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Her work is based on scholar-activist ethnographic research methods. Qutami’s broader scholarly interests include Palestine, critical refugee studies, the racialization of Arab/Muslim communities in the U.S., settler-colonialism, youth movements, transnationalism and indigenous and Third World Feminism.

Jolie Chea

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Jolie Chea is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her research draws from the work of historians, Native, Black, Latinx, and Asian American scholars to produce a narrative that situates the emergence of Southeast Asian refugees from the region formerly known as “French Indochina” to the settler state known as the “United States of America.” Her book manuscript traces a critical genealogy of the “refugee” that does not reinforce or reimpose normative understandings of citizenship and belonging but rather, traces the refugee figure back to a history of global racialized warfare and imperialist state violence, where she argues that the incorporation of the Cambodian refugee figure into the US body politic is an extension of ongoing efforts to discipline and contain radical opposition to a US nation-building project founded on war, racism, genocide, and the colonization of racialized bodies. She has spent two decades working alongside various immigrant, women, and queer youth of color communities, and one decade organizing with prison abolition movements in Los Angeles, where she combines social justice activism and scholarship. She is a former UC President’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Riverside, having prior completed her doctoral work in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC and a master’s in Asian American Studies at UCLA.

 

Jean-Paul R. Contreras deGuzman

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Dr. deGuzman is an historian of 20th century America with a particular focus on comparative racialization, urban history, Asian Americans, and Los Angeles. His book project, tentatively entitled A Touch of Danger: Southern California’s San Fernando Valley and the Racial Politics of An American Dream, explores how communities of color claimed and contested that iconic American space. The rest of his publications focus on three major areas — comparative race studies of Los Angeles, Asian American communities, and the (inter)discipline of Asian American Studies — and cover topics as varied as the genesis of boba cafes, student activism for Asian American Studies, the evolution of Shin Buddhism in Los Angeles, and various flash points in San Fernando Valley history (from Cold War civil rights activism to the secession movement to the place-based politics of historical memory and preservation).

A past recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, Dr. deGuzman’s pedagogy focuses on project-based learning and requires students to become engaged scholars adept at using historical analysis to understand themselves and the worlds around them. In addition to executing traditional research papers, his students have excavated and built a digital archive of a nearly century-old local Buddhist temple, created an ongoing catalogue of interethnic spaces in Los Angeles on Instagram, and, several successive Asian American history “pop-up” museums in the rotunda of Powell Library. Beyond the Asian American Studies Department, Dr. deGuzman regularly teaches a seminar on race, power, and Los Angeles in the Interracial Dynamics GE Cluster. He is also on the faculty of Windward School in Mar Vista where his greatest honor was getting selected to compete in the Windward Improv Troupe (W!T) annual student/faculty match.

Committed to public history, Dr. deGuzman helped found the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition, a network of civil rights activists, educators, descendants, and residents focused on the preservation of that World War II-era alien detention camp in Sunland-Tujunga. He has been an advisor to the L.A. Office of Historic Preservation and is a member of the archives and historic preservation committee of the Buddhist Churches of America, the oldest and largest Buddhist organization in the U.S.

Dr. deGuzman is an alumnus of the department having completed his M.A. thesis, portions of which were published in Adolescent Behavior Research Studies, under the direction of the late Don T. Nakanishi and Valerie J. Matsumoto.