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.

 

Andrew Do

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Andrew H. Do, MPH, is a summer lecturer in the Asian American Studies department, where he teaches Asian American Healthcare Issues.  Andrew is also a regular guest lecturer at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, lecturing on accounting, financial management, and information technology in healthcare.  An active alumni, he currently serves on the Board of Directors for the UCLA Health Policy and Management Alumni Association (HPMAA) and is a faculty advisor for The Liver Project at UCLA, a student initiative to fight liver disease and liver cancer by collaborating with nonprofits, schools, and other community organizations to perform para-medical outreach including education, fundraising, and clinical volunteering.

Andrew earned his Masters in Public Health (MPH), Healthcare Management, from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He is a double Bruin, also completing his undergraduate degree at UCLA in Political Science (BA) with double minors in Public Health and Asian American Studies.

Andrew works full time as the Executive Consultant for Kaiser Permanente’s Medical Group Operations in Southern California.  In this role, he acts as an advisor by structuring operational issues for resolution and leading the planning, management, and execution of key business processes associated with the Southern California Permanente Medical Group executive team, including performance management, strategic planning, communications, and tactical initiatives.

Benjamin K.P. Woo

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Benjamin K.P. Woo, M.D., (胡啟贇醫生) is Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the Geffen School of Medicine and holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA.  He is the Psychiatry Clerkship Director at the Olive View – UCLA Medical Center.  Also, he is the faculty advisor for the UCLA Asian Pacific Health Corps (APHC), an undergraduate student organization that promotes health awareness in the Asian communities.  Professor Woo serves on the Editorial Board of General Hospital Psychiatry Journal.  He has published many articles addressing mental health care disparities amongst Chinese Americans in the fields of emergency psychiatry and geriatric mental health.  Since 2009, he has spoken on 100+ radio shows on mental health topics on the only Cantonese radio station in Los Angeles, KMRB AM1430.

He has received many awards and honors for his work and teaching – among others, the Award for Excellence in Education from the UCLA School of Medicine, the Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies at UCLA, the Advancing Minority Mental Health Award from the American Psychiatric Foundation, and the Roeske Teaching Award from the American Psychiatric Association where he is also a Distinguished Fellow.

WEBSITE: https://people.healthsciences.ucla.edu/institution/personnel?personnel_id=8941644

Cindy Sangalang

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Cindy C. Sangalang, PhD, MSW is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies and Social Welfare at UCLA. Drawing on theory and knowledge across disciplines, her program of research examines how race, migration, and culture intersect to shape health and well-being in immigrant and refugee communities, with a focus on Southeast Asian youth and their families. A primary concern involves understanding developmental and health-related effects of racism and war- and migration-related traumas. These scholarly commitments are fueled by a broader goal of informing interventions that promote social justice and health equity.

Professor Sangalang has been a principal investigator on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). She earned her Ph.D. and Masters in Social Welfare from UCLA and trained as a postdoctoral fellow in health disparities research at Arizona State University. Previously she was on the faculty in Social Work at Arizona State University and California State University, Los Angeles.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi

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Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar).  Her interdisciplinary research engages critical refugee studies, comparative ethnic studies, and transpacific studies. Dr. Gandhi’s first book, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (2022), is published open access by the University of California Press. It examines Vietnamese refugee resettlement in Guam and Israel-Palestine as a means to trace two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire — how the Vietnam War is linked to US military build-up in Guam and unwavering support of Israel; and second, corresponding archipelagos of resistance — how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected via the Vietnamese refugee figure. This project analyzes what she calls the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of refugee subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. Dr. Gandhi is the co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (2023). She is also working on a second book-length project, Revisiting the Southern Question: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South, which asks: How were South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South connected during the Cold War period? What are the political, cultural, and affective afterlives of these historical encounters?  You can check out Dr. Gandhi’s films on Vimeo.  She also hosts a podcast, Distorted Footprints, through her Critical Refugee Studies class.

Lee Ann S. Wang

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Lee Ann S. Wang is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies. Her current work is an ethnographic study of immigration law and enforcement at the site of gender and sexual violence, focusing on the work of service providers and legal advocates with Asian immigrant women and their communities.  She examines how the law writes and maintains the meaning of protection under the Violence Against Women Act’s immigration provisions, the enlistment of the non-citizen legal subject towards policing, accumulative cooperation, and the visa petition’s role in neoliberal punishment practices.  At its core, the work strives to take up the already gendered and racialized task of writing about people and life, without re-inscribing victimhood in legal evidence and the violences of legal archive.  She has taught courses on Asian Americans and law, gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, immigration law and public policy, gender violence and policing, social welfare policy, and legal intimacies.  Dr. Wang is a former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law and held faculty appointments in Law and Public Policy, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington Bothell and visiting positions at the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa.

Courses Taught

  • Foundations of  Social Welfare Policy
  • Gender Violence, Policing, and the Law
  • Asian Americans and the Law
  • Critical Approaches to Emerging Issues in Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities 

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Jennifer Chun

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Jennifer Jihye Chun is Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department and the International Institute at UCLA. She was previously on the faculty at the University of Toronto (2012-18) and the University of British Columbia (2006-12). Her research explores the interconnected worlds of gender, race, ethnicity, migration and labor through a comparative and critical ethnographic lens. She is the author of the award-winning book, Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on informal and precarious worker organizing; Asian immigrant women and community organizing; gender, migration, and care work; and global labor movements. Currently, she is writing a book monograph on protest cultures in South Korea with Ju Hui Judy Han.