Phil Tajitsu Nash

Phil Tajitsu Nash is a lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). Nash has served as the Founding Executive Director of the Asian American Justice Center (AAJC), Staff Attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), Curator of the APA Program at the Smithsonian Institution’s 2010 Folklife Festival, and columnist for the N.Y. Nichibei and Asian Week newspapers.

Nash has taught law, urban studies, and APA history, art, oral history, and public policy classes at UMCP, Yale, New York University, The City College of New York, and CUNY and Georgetown law schools. He is also affiliated with the University of Maryland Latin American Studies Center, based on his decades of work with Native Americans in North America and Brazil on human rights, culture, and language issues. Nash helped to bring a Lakota language workshop to UM, and has taught a Study Abroad class for students in the Brazilian Amazon, where they studied rainforest ecology and indigenous issues.

In Memoriam Corky Lee (1947-2021)

By , and

The QView #92 (February 9, 2021) A friend of mine, Corky Lee, a Queens College alumnus, passed away last month from COVID-19. A “Queens kid,” Corky was famous as a photographer who used images to advance activism. He noticed how Asian Americans were almost always left out of the picture, literally. As a child of … Read more

Punctuated Equilibrium: Now Everyone is an Immigrant

By

OUR LIVES IN 2020 are being shaped by unfamiliar words, customs and concepts. Many of us are experiencing health insecurity, food insecurity, job insecurity, and fear of random violence. These concepts may be new to many of us, but they would have been very familiar to my grandfather Misao and many other immigrants and refugees, … Read more

Challenging the New Culture of Silence: From a Teacher Activist

By

EXACTLY 50 YEARS AGO, as the first English edition of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was being published in the United States, his friend and fellow educator-activist Richard Shaull noted that Freire’s analysis applied to the U.S. as well as Brazil: “Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of us and … Read more