SPEAKERS

Dr. Oliver Wang, California State University Long Beach

Oliver Wang is a culture writer, scholar, and DJ based in Los Angeles. He is a professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach and the author of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews of the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for NPR, Vibe, Wax Poetics, the Los Angeles Times, the Oakland Tribune, and the Village Voice, amongst others. He's the creator of the audioblog soul-sides.com and co-host of the album appreciation podcast, Heat Rocks. 

Dr. Loren Kajikawa, George Washington University

Loren Kajikawa is an associate professor of music at the George Washington University's Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. His main area of research and teaching is American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special attention to the dynamics of race and politics. From 2009 to 2018, Kajikawa was employed at the University of Oregon's School of Music and Dance, where he taught a variety of courses in music history, ethnomusicology, and musicology.

Soya has been active in the progressive movement for the last 25 years. During the 1990s she worked as a reporter at the International Examiner, communications and policy staff for the WA State House Democratic Caucus, and executive director of the Washington Alliance for Immigrant and Refugee Justice. She was the founding chair of the Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition, which formed in 1996 to restore food and cash assistance for low-income immigrants and refugees in Washington State. During the 2000s she worked at the Social Justice Fund, a public foundation supporting progressive organizations in the Northwest, and consulted for various institutions like the Western States Center, the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, the Nonprofit Assistance Center, the City of Seattle, and the Washington State Budget & Policy Center.At ChangeLab Soya has authored two research reports: Left or Right of the Color Line: Asian Americans and the Racial Justice Movement and The Importance of Asian Americans? It's Not What You Think, and co-authored the Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit. She has convened numerous public events uniting scholars with social movement activists to explore race, gender, war/empire, and Asian American identity. Her writing has been published in Othering & Belonging: Expanding the Circle of Human Concern, and cited in places like the Routledge Companion to Asian American Media, ColorLines, and The Guardian.

Tao Leigh Goffe holds a joint appointment between the Department of Africana Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is also a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization. At the intersections of the environmental humanities and science and technology studies, her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, memory, and nature. She spoke to the class about several of her recent publications, including work on "'Guano in their destiny': Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture," Amerasia Journal, June 2019; "Sugarwork: The Gastropoetics of Afro-Asia After the Plantation," Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, April, 2019, and "Albums of Inclusion: The Photographic Poetics of Caribbean Chinese Visual Kinship, and also discussed her newly established seminar, "Afro-Asia: Futurism and Feminisms."

Jordan Lynton is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University. Her dissertation research explores how legacies of colonialism and indenture, as well as PRC sponsored development in the Caribbean, complicate co-ethnic identification and immigrant incorporation within Chinese communities in Jamaica. Lynton discussed the way her research interrogates "diaspora" by examining how Chinese Jamaican, new Chinese migrants, and local organizations navigate community membership despite conflicting understandings of Chinese identity, culture, ethnicity, language, and national identity.

Claire Jean Kim is a professor of political science and Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include comparative race studies, human-animal studies, race and politics, and social movements. She is the author of Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (2000), as well as Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2015). Kim shared with the class the manuscript of the first chapter of her upcoming book, Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World, a sweeping analysis that describes the ontological reduction of blackness to non-humanness in relation to whiteness, and traces the effects of Asian-Americans' possession of not-blackness throughout history. She spoke to the class about a wide range of topics, including the complexities of the Lum v. Rice case, contemporary affirmative action debates, and how her consideration of racial relationality has evolved over the years.