Biography

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, specifically as it relates to youth mobility, movement, and mobilization. His research works across three areas of inquiry: 1) data erasure and data justice in Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities, 2) gender-based and sexual violence and intersectional healing in education, and 3) youth-based social movements and organizing. He is committed to working with and empowering youth of color. 

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 UCLA Early Academic Outreach Program College Adviser in the Los Angeles Unified School District. 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.