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.

Vinay Lal

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Vinay Lal was born in Delhi and raised in India, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States.

He studied literature, history, and philosophy as an undergraduate, and earned his B.A. from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University in 1982. He received a M.A. from the same institution, also in 1982, for a thesis on Emerson and Indian Philosophy. He then studied film in Australia and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship before commencing his graduate studies at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded his Ph.D. with Distinction in 1992. His dissertation, “Committees of Inquiry and Discourses of ‘Law and Order’ in Twentieth-Century British India”, received the Marc Galler Award for the best dissertation in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He was a William R. Kenan Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and Lecturer in History, at Columbia University in 1992-93.

Vinay joined the history faculty at UCLA in Fall 1993, and has since held several fellowships, including a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, and a fellowship from the Society for the Promotion of Science/Japan Area Studies Center at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. He was elected a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science in February 2000.

Vinay teaches a broad range of courses in Indian history, comparative colonial histories, subaltern history and Indian historiography, as well as graduate level seminars on the contemporary politics of knowledge, postcolonial theory, and the politics of culture. He has designed and taught a cycle of upper-division undergraduate lecture courses on British India, Contemporary South Asia, the Indian Diaspora, and the Moral and Political Thought of Mohandas Gandhi. Seminars in Indian history cover such subjects as the Politics of Religion and Ethnicity in South Asia; Hindu-Muslim Encounters in South Asia; “The Woman Question” in Colonial India; The Life of Krishna in Indian Art, History, and Culture; History and the Novel; the Partition of India; Violence in Contemporary Indian Society; and History and Popular Cinema.  His lecture courses in Indian history are now available in their entirety on YouTube, a link to which can be found below.

Vinay has written regularly on a wide variety of subjects for periodicals in the US, India, and Britain. Among other subjects, he has written on various aspects of the political and legal history of colonial India, sexuality in modern India, the popular Hindi film, the Indian diaspora, Indian documentaries, the politics and history of history, dissent in the Gandhian mode, contemporary American politics, the politics of culture, genocide, and the global politics of knowledge systems. His fifteen books reflect a similarly broad range of intellectual, political and research interests. His articles, reviews, commentaries, and op-pieces have appeared in over 150 publications. At present, he is a frequent contributor to The Indian Express and the Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai).

Vinay was formally associated as a Visiting Fellow in the summers of 1993 and 1994 with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the Delhi-based Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures. In more recent years, he has been associated since its inception with Multiversity, a group of scholars, intellectuals and activists that meets every other year in Penang, Malaysia, with the objective of engaging in a radical decolonization of the knowledge systems of the Western academy. He is also a founding member of the Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics (2010-present), which meets annually in Kerala. He shares the sentiments of the scholars, public intellectuals, and activists who are engaged in all these enterprises, which may be described as motivated by “an intellectual concern for the ecology of plural knowledge, a normative concern with cultural survival, and a potential concern with the search for humane futures for the victims of history.”

Between 2007 and 2012, Vinay divided his time between Delhi and Los Angeles. He served as University of California’s Director of the Education Abroad Program in India for 18 months, and while on leave from UCLA in 2010-11 he served as Professor of History at the University of Delhi.

See more at his page here: http://www.history.ucla.edu/faculty/vinay-lal

Mitchell Chang

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Chang’s research focuses on the educational efficacy of diversity-related initiatives on college campuses and how to apply those best practices toward advancing student learning and democratizing institutions. He has written over ninety publications, some of which were cited in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Grutter v. Bollinger, one of two cases involving the use of race sensitive admissions practices at the University of Michigan.

Gilbert Gee

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Gilbert C. Gee, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. He received his bachelor degree in neuroscience from Oberlin College, his doctorate in Health Policy and Management from the Johns Hopkins University, and post-doctoral training in sociology from Indiana University. His research focuses on the social determinants of health inequities of racial, ethnic, and immigrant minority populations using a multi-level and life course perspective. A primary line of his research focuses on conceptualizing and measuring racism discrimination, and in understanding how discrimination may be related to illness. He has also published more broadly on the topics of stress, neighborhoods, environmental exposures, occupational health, and on Asian American populations. Current projects include: the study of discrimination, racial identity and obesity among emigrants from the Philippines; the relationship between student loans and illness; toxic exposures among Asian American participants in NHANES.

His research has been honored with a group Merit Award from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a multicultural measures of discrimination for health surveys. In addition, he received two Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards from the Environmental Protection Agency for development of the Stress-Exposure-Disease Framework.

Dr. Gee is currently the Editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.  He has also been a guest editor for Child Development, Asian American and Pacific Islander Nexus Journal, and the Asian American Journal of Psychology.

Links: 

Additional Materials (Downloads):

This faculty member is available to serve as:

  • Doctoral Advisor
  • Masters Advisor
  • PhD Committee Member
  • DrPH Committee Member
  • MS Thesis Committee Member
  • MS Report Committee Member

Jerry Kang

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Please refer to Professor Kang’s official UCLA Faculty Web site: http://www.jerrykang.net/

Jerry Kang is Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.  He is also Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, Professor of Asian American Studies (by courtesy) at UCLA, and the inaugural Korea Times — Hankook Ilbo Chair in Korean American Studies and Law.

Professor Jerry Kang’s teaching and research interests include civil procedure, race, and communications. On race, he has focused on the nexus between implicit bias and the law, with the goal of advancing a “behavioral realism” that imports new scientific findings from the mind sciences into legal discourse and policymaking. He is also an expert on Asian American communities, and has written about hate crimes, affirmative action, the Japanese American internment, and its lessons for the “War on Terror.” He is a co-author of Race, Rights, and Reparation: The Law and the Japanese American Internment (2d ed. Wolters Kluwer 2013).

On communications, Professor Kang has published on the topics of privacy, pervasive computing, mass media policy, and cyber-race (the techno-social construction of race in cyberspace). He is also the author of Communications Law & Policy: Cases and Materials (4th edition Foundation 2012), a leading casebook in the field.

During law school, Professor Kang was a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review and Special Assistant to Harvard University’s Advisory Committee on Free Speech. After graduation, he clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, then worked at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on cyberspace policy.

He joined UCLA in Fall 1995 and has been recognized for his teaching by being elected Professor of the Year in 1998; receiving the law school’s Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2007; and being chosen for the highest university-wide distinction, the University Distinguished Teaching Award (The Eby Award for the Art of Teaching) in 2010.  At UCLA, he was founding co-Director of the Concentration for Critical Race Studies, the first program of its kind in American legal education. He is also founding co-Director of PULSE: Program on Understanding Law, Science, and Evidence.  During 2003-05, Prof. Kang was Visiting Professor at both Harvard Law School and Georgetown Law Center.  During the 2013-14 academic year, he was in residence at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice at NYU School of Law as a Straus Fellow as well as the David M. Friedman Fellow.

Prof. Kang is a member of the American Law Institute, has chaired the American Association of Law School’s Section on Defamation and Privacy, has served on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and has received numerous awards including the World Technology Award for Law and the Vice President’s “Hammer Award” for Reinventing Government.

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

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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/.

Grace Kyungwon Hong

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Grace Kyungwon Hong is Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA; she also holds a joint appointment in Gender Studies. She is also currently the Director of the Center for the Study of Women. Her research focuses on women of color feminism as an epistemological critique of, and alternative to, Western liberal humanism and racial capitalism, particularly as they manifest as contemporary neoliberalism.

She is the author of Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) which won the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies book prize, and The Ruptures of American Capital:  Women of Color Feminism and the Cultures of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is the co-editor (with Roderick Ferguson) of Strange Affinities:  The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011).  She is the co-editor (also with Roderick Ferguson) of the Difference Incorporated book series at the University of Minnesota Press.

Keith L. Camacho

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Professor Camacho received his training in the anthropology, literature, and history of the Pacific Islands at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He has also held research appointments in ethnic studies, gender studies, and native studies at the Australian National University, the University of Canterbury, the University of Illinois, and the University of Sydney. From 2014 to 2018, Professor Camacho then served as the Senior Editor of Amerasia Journal. His research has mainly focused on Chamorro cultural and historical politics, as well as American and Japanese colonialisms and militarisms more generally. Presently, Professor Camacho is studying Samoan youth violence and justice in Auckland, Aotearoa, and Los Angeles, California.