There is a growing consensus that the discipline of sociology and the social sciences broadly need to engage more thoroughly with the legacy and the present day of colonialism, Indigenous/settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism in the United States and globally. In Disciplinary Futures, edited by Nadia Y. Kim and Pawan Dhingra, a cross-section of scholars comes together to engage sociology and the social sciences by way of these paradigms, particularly from the influence of disciplines of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies.
With original essays from scholars such as Yến Lê Espiritu, Sunaina Maira, Hōkūlani K. Aikau, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Ben Carrington, Yvonne Sherwood, and Gilda L. Ochoa, among others, Disciplinary Futures offers concrete pathways for how the social sciences can expand from the limiting frameworks they traditionally use to study race and racism, namely: the black-white binary, the privileging of the nation-state, the fixation on the US mainland, the underappreciation of post- and settler-colonial studies, the liberal assumptions, and the limited conception of what constitutes data.
For this talk, Kim and Dhingra will discuss their contributed pieces, “‘Can’t We All Just Get Along?’ Public Opinion on Race in Los Angeles Twenty-Five Years after Rodney King” and “Precarity and Privilege: Racial Capitalism, Immigration, Law, and Immigrants’ Academic Pursuits,” and highlight chapters on “Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Studies” and “New Epistemologies and Methodologies.”
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.
Pawan Dhingra is associate provost and associate dean of the faculty and the Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank ’55 Professor of U.S. Immigration Studies, at Amherst College. He is president of the Association for Asian American Studies. A multiple-award winning author and teacher, his most recent monograph is Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (New York University Press, 2021), for which he was profiled in the Netflix documentary, Spelling the Dream. His bylines include The New York Times, Time Magazine, CNN, and other venues.
