Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Based on his new book, this presentation explores the recent history of Chinese immigration within the United States and the fundamental changes in spatial settlement that have relocated many low-skilled Chinese immigrants from New York City’s Chinatown to new immigrant destinations.
In recent years, New York City’s food delivery workers, a largely Asian and Latina/o immigrant workforce, have struggled against being characterized and policed as public safety “problems” even as these same workers became essential but unprotected during the Covid-19 pandemic. To better unpack the temporality of desire paths of delivery workers, Prof. Do Jun Lee mobilizes han, an indigenous Korean word for the inherited and collective emotions of transgenerational trauma from systematic oppressions. As such, understanding how and why food delivery workers are simultaneously “essential” and a “problem” is to re-member the intertwined and complex histories of place, migrations, mobilities, labor, and governance, which opens up possibilities for redefining the “problem.”
Discussion on the work of the Armenian-American Action Network, an U.S. advocacy and research organization fighting anti-Armenian racism in the United States and forwarding Armenian and all communities’ civil rights, immigrant rights and refugee rights.
ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 6, 2020, an Asian woman was attacked with acid outside her Brooklyn home by an unknown perpetrator, leaving chemical burns on her face, in addition to mental and emotional trauma.1 Although the attacker got away and no clear motive has been established, this likely hate crime occurred during a nationwide … Read more
In recent decades under runaway neoliberalism, “foreignized” and unauthorized immigrants have increasingly made political inroads by way of grassroots community activism and by sidestepping the need for formal political channels and, at times, even dismissing them. By way of nearly four years of ethnographic observation, 49 in-depth interviews, and extensive document analysis, Prof. Nadia Kim … Read more
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.