Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA

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Wednesday, December 7, 2022 | 4:30pm to 6pm

The industrial-port belt of Los Angeles is home to eleven of the top twenty oil refineries in California, the largest ports in the country, and those “racist monuments” we call freeways. In this uncelebrated corner of “La La Land” through which most of America’s goods transit, pollution is literally killing the residents. In response, a grassroots movement for environmental justice has grown, predominated by Asian and undocumented Latin@ immigrant women who are transforming our political landscape—yet we know very little about these change makers. In Refusing Death, Nadia Y. Kim tells their stories, finding that the women are influential because of their ability to remap politics, community, and citizenship in the face of the country’s nativist racism and system of class injustice, defined not just by disproportionate environmental pollution but also by neglected schools, surveillance and deportation, and political marginalization. The women are highly conscious of how these harms are an assault on their bodies and emotions, and of their resulting reliance on a state they prefer to avoid and ignore. In spite of such challenges and contradictions, however, they have developed creative, unconventional, and loving ways to support and protect one another. They challenge the state’s betrayal, demand respect, and, ultimately, refuse death.
 
Purchase Book: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24059
 
Co-Sponsors
CUNY Graduate Center Immigration Seminar Series
CUNY Graduate Center – MA Program in International Migration Studies
CUNY Graduate Center – PhD Program in Sociology and Advanced Research Collaborative
Asian American/Asian Research Institute – CUNY
Brooklyn College/CUNY – Asian American Studies Initiative
Brooklyn College/CUNY – American Studies Program
Brooklyn College/CUNY – Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies

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.