Ladder – UCLA Asian American Studies Department

Loubna Qutami

September 16, 2020/in Faculty, Ladder

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

August 23, 2020/in Faculty, Ladder

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.

Cindy Sangalang

July 17, 2019/in Faculty, Ladder

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

July 17, 2019/in Vietnam War refugees Faculty, Ladder

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. During the 2024-25 year, Dr. Gandhi serves as an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Lee Ann S. Wang

July 12, 2019/in Faculty, Ladder

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

News

Jennifer Chun

April 4, 2019/in Culture and capitalism, Gender and migration, Korean and Korean/American Studies, Labor and social movements, Theory and ethnography Faculty, Ladder

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies and Chair of International Development Studies (IDS) in the International Institute at UCLA. She is Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), where she leads the Transnational Gender and Labor Working Group, a joint initiative between the IRLE and the Center for the Study of Women (CSW)|Streisand Center.

Her research and teaching focuses on the interconnected worlds of labor, gender, race, migration, and social movements under global capitalism. Trained as a sociologist with a commitment to interdisciplinarity and ethnography, she has produced a body of scholarship that examines how workers employed on the bottom rungs of the labor market have sought to make sense of and collectively transform the unequal power dynamics that have shaped their everyday lives. Her first book, Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009), highlights the significance of the symbolic as a distinct form of worker power for women and immigrants who labor in low-paid, precarious jobs under neoliberal employment regimes. Her second book Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (co-authored with Ju Hui Judy Han and forthcoming from Stanford University Press), follows the turn to heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in the protest repertoires of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs. She has also written numerous articles, book chapters, and other publications about gender, migration, and care work; immigrant workers and community-based organizing; and informal and precarious labor politics. She is the co-editor of Gendering Struggles against Informal and Precarious Work (in Political Power and Social Theory), Care Work in Transition (in Critical Sociology), and Gender and Politics in Contemporary Korea (in the Journal of Korean Studies).

She received her B.A. in History at Dartmouth College, and her M.A. and PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was previously on the faculty in the Department of Sociology at The University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. While at the University of Toronto, she served as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

Karen Umemoto

September 4, 2018/in Faculty, Ladder

Professor Umemoto’s research centers on issues of democracy and social justice in multicultural societies with a focus on US cities. She also examines and pursues planning processes that include a diverse array of voices, acknowledges different ways of knowing, and allows for meaningful deliberations. She is equally concerned about the structural, procedural and relational obstacles to attaining a just and democratic society. Her research and practice thus takes a broad view of planning in the context of social inclusion, participatory democracy and political transformation.

Her recent work has focused on the problem of overrepresentation of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander youth in the Hawai‘i juvenile justice system. Professor Umemoto’s co-authored award-winning book entitled, Jacked up and unjust: Pacific Islander teens confront violent legacies, features youths’ narratives in an ethnographic study of youth violence in Hawai’i examined within the historic role of colonization and racial domination in the US. It critiques the punitive turn in juvenile justice and disciplinary policies and offers alternative approaches that focus on healing and restorative practices. She has also worked on juvenile justice reform initiatives as a researcher, evaluator, planner, and advocate.

Prof. Umemoto’s current research focuses on the history of placemaking in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. She is also working as the Co-Editor/Co-Director of Foundations and Futures, a multimedia textbook on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Editorial Boards

Editorial Board, Planning Theory, 2005-present
Editorial Board, AAPI Nexus: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Policy, Practice and Community, 2002-present

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

August 6, 2018/in Faculty, Ladder

L MSP Burns is an Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA, a land grant institution in the homeland of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples.

Areas of Interest
Burns’s writings include Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Global Empire (NYU Press, 2014 Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies by the Asian American Studies Association) and the co-edited anthology California Dreaming: Place and Movement in Asian American Imaginary (2020, University of Hawai’i Press). Burns is working on a second monograph, Asian American Elsewheres.

As a dramaturg, Burns has collaborated with BIPOC inter/multidisciplinary theater- and dance-makers David Rousseve/REALITY; Leilani Chan/TeAda Productions; Priya Srinivasan; Jay Carlon; and R. Zamora Linmark.

Burns is also a member of a research group consisting of artists, scholars, and art professionals who have been conducting research and conversations about the impact of COVID-19 closures and the COVID-19 pandemic on BIPOC theater artists and organizations. Information about this project may be found here: https://www.bipoctheatresurveys.com/.

David K. Yoo

April 23, 2018/in Faculty, Ladder

David K. Yoo is Professor of Asian American Studies and History, and Vice Provost, Institute of American Cultures. http://www.iac.ucla.edu/

Min Zhou

April 23, 2018/in Migration and development; urban sociology; the sociology of Asia and Asian America; race and ethnicity; Chinese diaspora Studies Faculty, Ladder

Dr. Min Zhou is Distinguished Professor of Sociology & Asian American Studies, Walter and Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in U.S.-China Relations & Communications, and Director of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She currently serves on the UCLA Council on Academic Personnel (CAP), the Executive Committee of Sociological Research Association (SRA), and the Board of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO). She was the founding chair of UCLA Asian American Studies Department (2001-05). Between 2013 and 2016, she took a leave of absence to be the Tan Lark Sye Chair Professor, Head of Sociology Division, and Director of the Chinese Heritage Centre, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Dr. Zhou is an internationally renowned scholar in the areas of migration and development, race and ethnicity, Chinese diaspora studies, urban sociology, and the sociology of Asia and Asian America, and has published 20 books and more than 230 journal articles and book chapters in these areas. She is the author of Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (1992), Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation (2009), and The Accidental Sociologist in Asian American Studies (2011); co-author of Growing up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States(with Bankston, 1998), The Asian American Achievement Paradox (with Lee, 2015), and The Rise of the New Second Generation (with Bankston, 2016); editor of Contemporary Chinese Diasporas (2007); and co-editor of Asian American Youth (with Lee, 2004), Contemporary Asian America (with Gatewood, 1st ed. 2000, 2nd ed. 2007; with Ocampo, 3rd ed. 2016), and Beyond Economic Migration: Historical, Social, and Political Factors in US Immigration (eds., with Mahmud, 2023).