Refusing Death: Asian and Latina Immigrant Women Activists on Race, Class, and Morality

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Friday, December 3, 2021 | 5:30pm to 7pm

In our global cities today, immigrants of color are increasingly suffering hyper-pollution and alarming rates of asthma and cancer due to their residence near diesel-spewing shipping ports, freeways, and rail yards, all so that we can buy goods at big box stores that hail from China and other far-flung manufacturing nations; immigrants and other people of color also reside and work in nearby hazardous industries, like oil refineries that prop up the aforementioned goods movement apparatus. Indeed, Americans are consuming so much that there has been a supply chain log jam for a year. In response, immigrant-led resistance movements against these environmental hazards are among the most dynamic in our global cities. Yet, we know little about them. In this vein, Prof. Nadia Kim in her new book, Refusing Death, chronicles how Asian and Latina immigrant women activists for environmental justice in Los Angeles—namely cleaner, more breathable air—redefine racism and classism as a result of their struggles with environmental racism and classism, and their specific social positionings under neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy.

Purchase Book: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24059

Author Bio

Nadia Y. Kim is Claudius M. Easley, Jr. Faculty Fellow Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on U.S. race and citizenship hierarchies concerning Korean/Asian Americans and South Koreans, race and nativist racism in Los Angeles (e.g., 1992 LA Unrest), environmental (in)justice, immigrant women, and comparative racialization of Latinxs, Asian Americans, and Black Americans, and race theory. Throughout her work, Kim’s approach centers (neo)imperialism, transnationality, and the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and citizenship.

Dr. Kim has written two multi-award-winning books, the most recent, Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford University Press), examines Asian and Latina immigrant women's movements for clean air. Her second book, Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA (Stanford, 2008), is an exploration of how immigrants navigate American imperial racism. Her third book, co-edited with Dr. Pawan Dhingra, Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies (NYU Press, 2023), addresses how sociology (and other social sciences) benefit from engaging with critical ethnic studies.

Dr. Kim has also (co)authored articles in anthologies and volumes of the top academic journals: Social Forces, Social Problems, International Migration Review, and The Du Bois Review. She and/or her work have been featured (inter)nationally on such fora as Red Table Talk, National Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, Radio Korea, local TV news and in The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, (MS)NBC News, The Boston Globe, The Korea Times, and NYLON Magazine.