Kelly Fong

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Dr. Kelly Fong (she/her) holds a Ph.D. in archaeology from UCLA with a graduate concentration in Asian American Studies. Her interdisciplinary work bridges her interest in Asian American social histories, community-based histories, and historical archaeology to examine everyday life through materials and memories left behind. Dr. Fong is involved with several research projects. In Isleton, Chinatown, she utilizes archaeological methods, material culture, and oral histories to explore everyday experiences during Exclusion in this Sacramento Delta community. Her work in Isleton has been featured in the Asian Americana podcast and the HBO series “Take Out with Lisa Ling” (2022). Dr. Fong is also the project co-lead for Five Chinatowns, a community place-based history project with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California that documents five different Chinese American communities in Los Angeles city between 1882 and 1965. Drawing from archival sources and oral histories, Five Chinatowns is a multigenerational public history project that has involved training several cohorts of high school and college student interns in community-based oral history research. Finally, Dr. Fong is part of the research team examining Chinese American diasporic networks through 20th century restaurant ceramics distributed by F.S. Louie Company, a Berkeley-based wholesaler that supplied ceramics to many Chinese restaurants across the US.

Over the past decade, Dr. Fong has taught in Asian American Studies, history, and anthropology at multiple universities in Southern California. In addition to teaching in AASD at UCLA, she regularly teaches with the UCLA GE Cluster 20 (Race and Indigeneity) teaching team. Her approach to teaching draws from Ethnic Studies pedagogy and seeks to inspire students to make critical connections between what they are learning in the classroom to themselves, and to apply this knowledge to make a difference in their communities. To foster this pedagogical approach, Dr. Fong designs creative projects for her courses that engage learners and challenge them to apply their knowledge in different formats, including creating community newspapers inspired by Gidra, developing a community cookbook, and authoring a “People’s Guide” to Chinatown. In 2022, Dr. Fong was the first lecturer to receive the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies.

In addition to teaching for AASD, Dr. Fong is project co-director for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook. This narrative change project seeks to bring Asian American Studies to high school and college classrooms across the US and is scheduled to launch mid-2025.

Dr. Fong has also been active in advocating for institutional change and increased diversity within archaeology. She is a member of the Society for California Archaeology’s Coalition for Diversity in California Archaeology (CDCA) and she serves as co-taskforce lead for Asian American Pacific Islander archaeologists within the Coalition. Her work with CDCA has included pushing the Society for California Archaeology to commit to anti-racism training, developing an equity statement, and openly recognizing the need to address institutional inequities in the field.

Lois Takahashi

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UCLA Luskin professor emeritus Takahashi’s research focuses on public and social service delivery to vulnerable populations in the U.S. and in Southeast Asian cities. Her expertise spans several issues, including homelessness and HIV/AIDS in Los Angeles, community opposition directed at social services (the NIMBY syndrome) in the U.S., social capital and health for vulnerable populations, and environmental governance in the U.S. and Southeast Asian cities.

She is currently investigating the dynamics of social capital, especially related to health in impoverished and marginalized communities. Her environmental governance research (with her collaborators Amrita Daniere and Jeffrey Carpenter) has investigated the role of low-income residents and non-governmental organizations in environmental management and policy making in Bangkok, Thailand and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

She is a past Director of the University of California Asian American and Pacific Islander Policy Multicampus Research Program (UC AAPI Policy MRP), where she worked with state elected officials and community organizations to develop policy relevant studies that highlight areas of importance for California’s AAPI population. Recent reports have focused on educational disparities and victimization/incarceration patterns.

She has served as president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning.

She taught courses on Planning Theory and History, Locational Conflict; Homelessness: Housing and Social Service Issues and Urban Policy and Planning.

Takahashi served as interim dean during the time that a search was underway for a permanent successor to Frank D. Gilliam, Jr.

Shu-mei Shih

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Roberto Chao Romero

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With a Mexican father from Chihuahua and a Chinese immigrant mother from Hubei in central China, Romero’s dual cultural heritage serves as the basis for his academic studies.

His research examines Asian immigration to Latin America, as well as the large population of “Asian-Latinos” in the United States. His first book, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (2010), tells the forgotten history of the Chinese community in Mexico.   The Chinese in Mexicoreceived the Latina/o Studies Section Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association.

Drawing upon his background as attorney, Romero’s second area of research examines the legal history of Chicano/Latino segregation as well as immigration  law and policy. His most recent research explores the role of spirituality in Chicana/o social activism.

Romero received his J. D. from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Latin American history from UCLA.

Vinit Mukhija

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Vinit Mukhija is a Professor and Department Chair of Urban Planning in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

His research focuses on informal housing and slums in developing countries and “Third World-like” housing conditions (including colonias, unpermitted trailer parks, and illegal garage apartments) in the United States. He is particularly interested in understanding the nature and necessity of informal housing, and strategies for upgrading and improving living conditions in unregulated housing. His work also examines how planners and urban designers in both developing and developed countries can learn from the everyday and informal city.

Four research questions and objectives guide his research. First, what is the nature of informal housing, including its prevalence, characteristics, heterogeneity, determinants, rationale, advantages and disadvantages? Second, how can living conditions within slums and informal housing be improved, and what is the role of different institutional actors, including state, civil society, and market actors, within this process? Third, how should conventional planning and urban design approaches change in response to the prevalence of informality, particularly informal housing? Fourth, how do policy ideas in housing and land development travel and spread in a globalized world? The broad objective of his work is to help identify and improve strategies for increasing access to decent housing among the urban poor as a planning pathway to social and spatial justice.

Professor Mukhija’s current and past major projects include research on slum upgrading and redevelopment in Mumbai (Bombay), India; research on colonias, infrastructure-poor neighborhoods, and unpermitted trailer parks in California; evaluation of inclusionary housing requirements in Southern California; research on legal and illegal garage apartments or “Backyard Homes” in Los Angeles as a form of affordable housing and stealth density; and research on the nature of informality in U.S. cities. He is the author of one book, Squatters as Developers? Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai (Ashgate, 2003), and co-editor of a recently published volume, The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor(MIT Press 2014, with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris).

Professor Mukhija trained as an urban planner (Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology), urban designer (MUD, University of Hong Kong), and architect (M.Arch., University of Texas, Austin, and B.Arch., the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi). He also has professional experience as an urban designer and physical planner in India, Hong Kong, and Kuwait with new town design proposals and projects in India, China, and the Middle East. Before coming to UCLA he worked as a post-doctoral researcher for the Fannie Mae Foundation in Washington, D.C., and developed neighborhood upgrading and renewal strategies for American cities. Some of his past projects have been funded by the Haynes Foundation, the California Policy Research Center, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the World Bank.

Professor Mukhija has won multiple awards for his teaching at UCLA (2007, 2009 and 2013), and his teaching portfolio includes courses on informality in U.S. cities, housing policies in the majority world, and planning studios. Recent neighborhoods for his studios have included Downtown Los Angeles (2014), Atwater Village (2012), East Hollywood (2011), the City of Bell (2010), East Los Angeles (2009), Pacoima (2008), and Hyde Park (2007).

Professor Mukhija has also advised the newly formed Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bangalore, on course and curriculum development. His other community and public service contributions include membership on the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Area Neighborhood Initiative (LANI), a non-profit focused on community-based urban revitalization strategies; service as the Co-Chair of the Global Planning Educators Interest Group (GPEIG) within the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP); and as an editorial advisory board member of the Journal of the American Planning Associationand the Journal of Planning Education and Research.

Ailee Moon

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Dr. Moon’s areas of research interest include social welfare policy, program evaluation, and gerontology.

As a principal investigator on a five-year inter-university consortium research project funded by the California Department of Social Services, she recently completed an evaluation study of the implementation of family preservation and support programs in California.

Her recent research activities also include “Evaluation of the API Dementia Care Network,” funded by the Alzheimer’s Association of Los Angeles, “Evaluation of General Relief Time Limit Policy in Los Angeles County” and “Evaluation of the ‘Community Empowerment Project: Domestic Violence Prevention in the Korean American Community,’” funded by the California Department of Health. Dr. Moon, with Dr. Young In Song at California State University, Hayward, is a co-editor of two books, entitled Korean American Women Living in Two Cultures and Korean American Women: From Tradition to Modern Feminism.

Dr. Moon is also active in gerontological research, particularly, in the areas of elder abuse, mental health, and service utilization. Currently, she is a Hartford Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholar, funded to study “Cultural and Non-Cultural Factors in Elder Abuse Assessment and Intervention.” Dr. Moon and her colleagues completed a study, titled “A Multicultural Study of Attitudes toward Elder Mistreatment and Reporting,” funded by the National Center on Elder Abuse.

She was a co-principal investigator with Dr. James Lubben on a four-year study funded by the National Institute on Aging that examines social supports and long-term care use among elderly Korean and non-Hispanic white Americans. Dr. Moon has published 55 articles, book chapters, research reports and monographs.

Dr. Moon is serving as the director of the Department’s Ph.D. program.

Michelle Caswell

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Her current research explores the role of records and archival institutions in the construction of memory about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and traces a collection of mug shots taken at Tuol Sleng prison from their creation as bureaucratic documents, to their inclusion in archives, digitization, and use by survivors and the family members of victims to spark narratives about the regime and memorialize the dead.

Her articles have appeared in Archival Science, Archivaria, American Archivist, The Journal of Documentation, InterActions, First Monday, and Libri.

Caswell is also the co-founder and a board member of the South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saadigitalarchive.org).

Robert Nakamura

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Professor Robert A. Nakamura, a pioneering filmmaker and influential teacher and mentor, “the Godfather of Asian American media” has been a major force in the conception and growth of community media since 1970. Nakamura left a successful career in photojournalism and advertising photography to become one of the first to explore, interpret and present the experiences of Japanese Americans in film. His ground-breaking personal documentary Manzanar (1972) revisited painful childhood memories of incarceration in an American concentration camp during World War II, and it has been selected for major retrospectives on the documentary form at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Film Forum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Karen Umemoto

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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

Anna S. Lau

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For more information please visit laulab.psych.ucla.edu.