Elizabeth Hanna Rubio

Elizabeth Hanna Rubio will receive her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine (June 2021). She will continue on as a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA's Asian American Studies department. Building on her background as a community organizer, Rubio writes about the fraught politics of multiracial coalition-building in immigrant justice spaces and the complexities of thinking immigrant justice through an abolitionist lens. Her current project explores these themes through four years of ethnographic research with undocumented Korean American organizers in Southern California, Washington D.C., and Chicago. You can find her work published in Amerasia Journal, The Journal for the Anthropology of North America, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights, and other mediums.

Black-Asian Solidarities and the Impasses of ‘How-To’ Anti-Racisms

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Building on a broader body of work that has critiqued liberal anti‐racisms for detracting from abolitionst struggles against racialized injustice, this presentation based on an article by Prof. Elizabeth Hanna Rubio specifically frames the limitations that “how‐to anti‐racisms” place on transgressive multiracial coalition building. Through ethnographic analysis of discourses and practices that move through various sites of contemporary Black‐Asian American activist encounters, Prof. Rubio builds on Black and radical women of color feminist theorizations of solidarity to show how “how‐tos” destabilize coalition building by overdetermining resolutions to conflict.

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Contentious Solidarities: Navigating Racialization and Alliance-Building in Korean American Immigrant Rights Work

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Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with Korean American immigrant rights organizers, and the Black and Latinx organizers with which they attempt to build solidarity, this presentation explores how the aforementioned tensions unfold in activists’ daily interactions as they attempt to build an interracial solidarity movement at a moment of intensified anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy-making.

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