Sean Sugai 

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Sean Sugai (he/him/his) is a graduate student in the concurrent Master of Social Welfare and Master of Arts in Asian American Studies program. Sean researches at the intersection of race, data, and the carceral state to examine how institutions construct, control, and erase populations, histories, and knowledges. Sean’s research works across three areas of inquiry: 1) data erasure and data justice in Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities, 2) institutional harm, particularly gender and race-based violence, and intersectional healing in education, and 3) youth-based movements and resistance to surveillance, policing, and incarceration. Drawing from demography, social work, and education, he is committed to working with, empowering, and imagining youth of color beyond the carceral state.  

Sean’s community and academic work is deeply influenced by his upbringing in Waipahu and Pearl City on the island of O’ahu, where he grew up as a gay Japanese-Filipinx settler in a low income, immigrant, and single parent household. This background significantly shaped Sean’s undergraduate research on anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and US empire across the Pacific, with a particular focus on Filipino/a/x immigrants in Hawai’i. This work remains close to Sean’s scholarship, as it not only demonstrates the importance of community-based research, but also how the Pacific, with its colonial and carceral entanglements, produces unique racial formations.

Professionally, Sean worked in the field of higher education access, beginning in the UCLA Office of Undergraduate Admissions and later serving as a full-time College Adviser with the UCLA Early Academic Outreach Program. He stays actively involved in the college access field, not only to support and uplift students directly, but to challenge the systems and institutions he seeks to transform.

Sean believes that being a good researcher and educator requires being a present, engaged, and affirming community member and mentor. He welcomes any opportunity to mentor and support students at all stages in their journey.

Priscilla Soun

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Priscilla Soun is a second-generation Cambodian American who was born and raised in the East Bay Area of California. She is the eldest daughter of seven children. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in Asian American Studies. While at UCLA, she worked as the Transfer Coordinator for UCLA’s Southeast Asian retention project, known as SEA CLEAR, and sat on as a member of the Undergraduate Leadership Committee for the Asian American Studies Department. She also served in various facilitator and coordinator positions for UCLA’s Student-Initiated Admit Weekends for first year traditional and transfer students. 

Eve Chen

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Eve Chen (they/them) is an artist, queer child of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, born and raised on Tongva land (Los Angeles, CA). Eve’s familial history is one wrought with war from Guangdong, China, Cambodia, and Saigon, Vietnam. Through unfolding this history, they are interested in understanding how children of refugees and war can reconnect to the lands that their bodies were exiled from. Their art and research seeks to explore (1) How refugees fit into the broader Asian American immigrant narrative, (2) What the relationship is between the children of refugees and the country that produced their family’s refugeehood, (3) How children of refugees understand, imagine, and desire the homeland. Eve hopes to disseminate these stories through their art and research and bring light and healing to their community.

Karen Yimeng Wang

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I am a second-generation Chinese American whose parents immigrated to the U.S. as electrical engineers following the 1965 reversal of anti-Asian immigration policies. Furthermore, as someone who grew up in the Bay Area, studied computer science at Stanford, and worked as a software engineer at Google, my life has been shaped, for better or for worse, by Silicon Valley.

My research asks how Asian America produces and is produced by Silicon Valley. Why and how do Asian Americans participate in a system that racializes and subjugates them? What can we understand about the workings of capitalism, militarism, and other regimes of power by analyzing the ways in which Asian Americans are differentially included in/excluded from the tech industry, and how racial hierarchies are reproduced through the “techno-capital machine?” And finally, how can Asian American stories help us imagine alternative futures that challenge Silicon Valley’s homogenizing and ahistorical narratives?

Sophia Anne Vertido

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Sophia Vertido (she/her) is a second-generation Filipinx-American woman who was born and raised in Aurora, Colorado. She is currently a first-year Masters student, pursuing a degree in Asian American Studies. Prior to UCLA, Sophia received her Bachelors at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Political Science and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her undergraduate research explored domestic culture in the Philippines during the American colonial period, using frameworks of imperialism and gender to argue how American colonialism promoted hegemonic constructions of Filipina womanhood but also simultaneously created spaces for resistance and counter-hegemony. She plans to continue researching the role that Filipina women played in resisting US empire-building.

Lindsey Chou

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Lindsey Chou (she/they) is the proud daughter of Cambodian refugees, born and raised across Garden Grove and Long Beach, CA. She is currently a first-year Master’s student pursuing a dual degree in Asian American Studies and Social Work. Prior to UCLA, she received a B.A. in Asian American Studies and Psychology from Stanford University, where she was heavily involved in Southeast/Asian American community and educational spaces. Her work examines various forms of memory in upholding and disrupting colonial notions of trauma, healing, and care. Drawing inspiration from community members engaged in alternative forms of care and resistance in the everyday, she seeks to build critical pedagogy and care practices that center self- and community-driven knowledge production. Lindsey is also a big lover of Spotify playlists, live music, animated media, parks (big and small), and a good dilly dally.

Kevin Thor

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Kevin Thor (he/him/tub) is a proud queer son of Hmong refugees from Laos, born and raised on native Yokuts land (Fresno, CA). He thinks of the ways love graces all of us in some shape or way and its ability to transform people and society. More specifically, he is currently curious about love in Hmong communities, and wonders about the ways love is thought about, perceived, displayed, and then passed down from parent to child, and how that child, then, ultimately shows up for themselves and others in this precarious world. Guided by the love and care from family and chosen family, community, and mentors, Kevin is excited to deepen his understandings and exploration of intergenerational family dynamics and navigating conflicting beliefs, methods of conflict resolution to strengthen community/familial bonds, trans and queer Hmong stories of love, and the Hmong diaspora. He hopes that through his gathering and encouragement of people to tell their (love) stories, that it breathes some form of love into our society.

Kevin is a lover of staying physically active, anything and everything Studio Ghibli, coffee, cooking (although still learning…) with community and then eating together, beaches, hiking, and reading books/listening to songs/watching movies that make him feel.

Othelia Jumapao

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Othelia Jumapao is a non-binary Pilipinx American who grew up in Florida while pursuing their English degree with an Asian American Studies minor at the University of Florida. After college, they worked for various non-profits, their most recent workplace being the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum where they worked as the Florida Organizer. In their organizer role, they ran campaigns surrounding reproductive rights, immigrant rights, and voting rights for Asian women and gender diverse folks. They supported the campaign for Ballot Amendment #4 in Florida which would codify abortion access in the state constitution. Othelia is passionate about disability justice and gender justice for LGBT+ people of color. Their scholarly area of interests include movement studies, liberation theology, and ethnic studies in K-12 education.

Lauren Casey Sese Ribancos

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Filipina-American born and raised in Palmdale, CA. She received her Bachelors of Arts in History Honors and minored in Asian American Studies at California State University, Long Beach.

All of her research has been inspired by Asian American experiences, taking on intersectional approaches for Filipino-Americans & Chinese-Americans regarding immigration, assimilation, and diaspora. She is passionate about Oral History and accessible resources in academia, which is reflected in her role as a community college tutor, Oral Historian, and Writer on historic Asian American communities in Long Beach.

On her free time, she competitively powerlifts, spends all of her money on food, cook, and take long walks on the beach.

Paige Yuen

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Paige Yuen is a second year graduate student born and raised on the island of Oʻahu. She received her Bachelors at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Political Science and Sociology. Utilizing settler colonial, critical race, and Indigenous theoretical frameworks, her undergraduate thesis focused on East Asian settler colonialism in the illegally occupied state of Hawaiʻi and its impact on legislation regarding real estate, public and private land, and statehood. Going into her second year at UCLA, Paige is researching land leases utilized by the U.S. Army for training areas on the island of Oʻahu as the leases are set to expire in 2029. Outside of academia, Paige loves the beach, hiking, and spending time with her three dogs, Roy, Pete, and Jess.