Neelanjana Banerjee

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Neelanjana Banerjee is an expert in Asian American arts, and Asian Pacific American and Asian diasporic literature. In 20 plus years of work in mainstream and independent journalism, youth development work, Asian American arts, copywriting, and editing, she has honed her strengths as a communicator across various platforms. Banerjee’s journalism, fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely in publications like Harper’s Bazaar, The Texas Observer, World Literature Today, Prairie Schooner, and more. She is the co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Literature (University of Arkansas Press), the first of its kind; along with The Coiled Serpent, a collection of Southern California poets from Tia Chucha Press. She is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, a 30-year-old independent publishing house dedicated to Asian Pacific American and Asian diasporic literature. Banerjee teaches Creative Writing and Publishing at UCLA, and other Southern California universities.

Soo Mee Kim

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Jollene Levid

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Jollene Levid has been a full-time union organizer for over 19 years. She has been a Lead, a Regional Organizer at United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) for the last 9 years, and was co-coordinator of the 2019 UTLA strike and the 2023 UTLA solidarity strike. Previously, she was a Director and a union organizer and negotiator at CIR/SEIU and SEIU 721 healthcare locals, and for two short campaigns in the Philippines. Jollene was first trained and introduced to the labor movement by participating in the 2002 UCLA Labor Center Summer Internship Program and has organized full-time in Los Angeles since 2004.
Jollene is also a survivor and a feminist. Organizing with women saved her life, and for over 22 years, she has been a member of the anti-imperialist, transnational feminist organization AF3IRM, formerly serving as the National Chairperson and currently serving on its International Committee.
She got her Bachelor of Arts degree at UC Irvine in Political Science and Asian American Studies, where she organized in student movements for Filipino Studies, solidarity with workers on strike, and against the war. She received her Masters of Social Work from USC, with a concentration on Community Organization, Policy, Planning, and Organization. She was an inaugural UCLA Labor Movement Fellow in 2023.

Albert Kochaphum

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Albert Sitipong Kochaphum holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree from UCLA and a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from San Francisco State University. From 2014 to 2021, he served as the Campus GIS Coordinator at UCLA, working on various research groups such as the Million Dollar Hoods, UCLA Hate Crime Map, and the Mapping Asian American Political Potential project. He currently works at Los Angeles Metro, focusing on open data and real-time transit mapping projects.

Kochaphum currently volunteers as the Academic Lead for the United Nations Smart Maps group. He has also previously volunteered with organizations like StreetsForAll, creating a bot to tweet about traffic accidents.

Since 2021, he has been teaching courses on Web Development and GIS for Social Change. Kochaphum has been a speaker at the FOSS4G North America conference, the premier open geospatial technology and business conference, and the FOSS4G Asia 2023 conference in Seoul, Korea, which aimed to support the UN sustainable development goals agenda.

Drawing from his academic and civic engagement work, Kochaphum also works as an indie game developer, focusing on solar punk and post-capitalist games.

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.

She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Future Histories, which explores how indigenous experiences of time in Palestine and Hawaii inform liberation struggles. Prof. Joudah is also expanding her work on Gaza as an example of indigenous urbanism despite elimination.

Amber Chong

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Amber Chong (she/her) is a second generation Vietnamese-Chinese woman who grew up on Tongva land, also known as the San Gabriel Valley. Prior to pursuing the dual MA in Asian American Studies and Masters in Social Welfare, she studied Politics and Asian American Studies at Scripps College, where she learned from and continues to draw inspiration from feminist abolitionist organizers. At UCLA, she hopes to collaborate with other Southeast Asian community members to envision decolonial and anti-ableist frameworks of health. She is interested in strategies that solidify emotional support and interdependence within communities and divest from the medical industrial complex by challenging traditional notions of care. In her free time, Amber enjoys watching films with loved ones, indulging in a sweet treat, and soaking up the sun in nature.

Angelina Karnsouvong

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Angelina Karnsouvong (they/she) is a queer second-generation Khmu and Lao refugee born and raised on Chochenyo Ohlone land (Richmond, CA). They received their Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Berkeley in both Ethnic Studies and Public Health.

Angelina is currently in their second year of graduate education, pursuing a joint masters in Asian American Studies (MA) and Community Health Sciences (MPH). Their primary research focuses on de-centering colonial biomedical understandings of health and healthcare to re-center community, culture, and indigenous healing practices, with an emphasis on re-envisioning Khmu wellbeing in Southeast Asian refugee diaspora, as well as the role of critical history and community education in achieving better health outcomes. They are especially passionate about the concept of diversifying narratives and being the teller of one’s own story, which influences a great deal of their work in research, community organizing, and creative spaces.

In their free time, Angelina enjoys writing, drawing, spending time with friends, being outdoors (except in LA), building Legos, staring at bodies of water, and reading wiki articles on niche topics.

Joshua Luo

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Joshua Luo (he/him/his) is a first-generation Han Chinese immigrant who is currently a second-year MA student in Asian American Studies at UCLA. His research interests include science and technology studies (STS), surveillance studies, affect theory, and settler-colonial studies, especially the intersection of Sinophone/Chinese and Uyghur diaspora, literature, and culture in North America, with a particular emphasis on the possibility of decolonial and anti-imperial solidarity against multiple empires in the context of escalating US-China tensions.

April Yang

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April Yang is pursuing her MA in Asian American Studies and MSW at UCLA. Her research is focused on gender-based violence against women in Hmong American communities. She received her BA in World Arts and Cultures and Asian American Studies from UCLA in 2015. She has worked primarily in the public sector with underserved and underrepresented communities in her hometown, Sacramento, CA.

Esther Se Bin Kim

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Esther Se Bin Kim (She/They) is a 1.5-generation Korean-American from San Francisco. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Humanities and a minor in Asian American Studies at UCLA in 2020. She is currently a first-year graduate student pursuing an M.A. in Asian American Studies. Her research focuses on investigating currently existing methods of promoting educational equity within the University of California system for undocumented East Asian students, while also examining the legal and socio-cultural nuances that comprise the seemingly paradoxical experience of being both East Asian and undocumented. She is passionate about grassroots organizing and mutual aid work, specifically on unhoused advocacy and food justice. In her free time, she enjoys powerlifting, binge-watching anime, listening to true crime podcasts, and mindlessly scrolling down her Tik-Tok For You page.