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Maile Arvin - marvin@weber.ucsd.edu

B.A., English Literature, Swarthmore College (2005)

Areas of Interest: My research interests center around current political and social issues facing Native Hawaiians. I am particularly interested in sovereignty issues and public discourse about race in Hawaii, including recent legal battles (Doe v. Kamehameha Schools ) and legislation such as the Akaka Bill ( S. 310, H.R. 505 Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act ). I come to UC San Diego with a background in working at community non-profit organizations, including most recently Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center, a San Francisco-based agency serving Asian & Pacific Islanders living with or at-risk for HIV/AIDS. Related interests include mixed race identities,alliances formed between ethnic minority groups, indigenous and Pacific Islander rights.

Laura Beebe - lbeebe@ucsd.edu

B.S., English, SUNY, Brockport

Mentor: Ross Frank

Research Interests: Beebe's McNair research paper, “Native American Presence in Mary Rowlandson¹s Sovereignty and Goodness of God” is a close examination and deconstruction of Mary Rowlandson’s report of Native American behavior during her period of captivity with the Narragansett Indians. She would like to continue to explore language’s role in developing and maintaining the status of ethnicities. Such an exploration would begin with an examination of the history of the language of racialization from American colonization to the present.

Michael Lujan Bevacqua - mbevacqua@ucsd.edu

B.A’s: Art and Literature, University of Guam
M.A.: Micronesian Studies, University of Guam
M.A.: Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2007

Research Interests: Acts of decolonization, the (re)production of sovereignty, sovereignty and indigenous peoples, the obscene dimensions of sovereignty, the fantasies of Empire, everyday language revitalization, diasporic decolonization, the cultural vs. the political, the scenes and metaphors of colonization, death, suicide and decolonization

Current research projects/papers: “The (Un)exceptional Life of a Non-voting Delegate: Chamorros, Guam and the Production of American Sovereignty; The (U)nexceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, U.S.A.; “Decolonization and Diaspora:” The Resistance and Insistence of Decolonization Amongst Chamorros in California;Impossible Cultures: Three Moments of Chamorro Dissolution; The Scene of Liberation or What Does Spam have to do with the Colonization of Guam?; Marvel’s Civil War: The Failed Revolutionary Moment of Captain America

University of Guam Master’s Thesis: “These May or May Not Be Americans!” The Patriotic Myth and the Hijacking of Chamorro History in Guam.

Ethnic Studies M.A. Thesis: Everything You Wanted to Know About Guam, But Were Afraid to Ask Zizek

Proposed UCSD Dissertation: Guam: Where the Production of America’s Sovereignty Begins!

Abstract: Although history makes clear that Guam has been attached to the United States since 1898, when it was taken during the Spanish American War, what comprises this relationship is hardly clear. Guam is, on a daily basis: Guam, U.S.A., Guam: America in Asia, Guam: Where America’s Day Begins, Guam: Pacific Outpost. It is a tiny U.S. island in the Pacific, an unincorporated territory of the United States, an American possession, protectorate, dependency and, according to a 2006 issue of Foreign Policy, it is one of its six most important US bases in the world today. This strategic military importance, however, does not translate into coherent frames or knowledge about Guam, as in the course of a year American films, television shows and comic books will make Guam a foreign country, a picture perfect tropical paradise, an overseas military base, an island full of cannibals, an island of exiled homosexuals, a place where military careers go to die, and Guatemala.
The intent of this research project is to interrogate the diverse ways that Guam appears or is “mentioned” in various American texts, such as newspapers, films, political rhetoric and internet message board discussion and mark these mentions as moments where different “American” identities, narratives and sovereignties are produced based on the intersection of Guam’s incredible military importance with its ambiguous banal/colonial status, which is characterized by a general lack of knowledge and national imagining of Guam, mixed with clear formal American plenary authority over the island.

Dissertation Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Ross Frank, K. Wayne Yang, Jody Blanco, Keith Lujan Camacho

Benita H. Brahmbhatt - bbrahmbh@weber.ucsd.edu

MA: Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, (2004)
BA: Macalester College (2000)
Majors: International Studies and Political Science
Minor: Women's and Gender Studies

Research Interests: Race and the Law, Asian American Studies, Critical Gender Studies

MA Thesis Title: "Trans/National Political Cultures: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in South Asian America"

MA Thesis Abstract: In this thesis I argue that transnationalism is a constitutive component of South Asian American Political culture. Through archival and ethnographic research, I examine the narrative and political strategies of two US-based Hindu nationalist organizations and one queer South Asian organization to situate how these groups operate on local, national, and transnational levels. My central concern is how the frameworks of US multiculturalism and South Asian American transnationality shape the articulation of minority politics in the US. By bringing together a discussion of Hindu Nationalism and queer South Asian organizing—two socio-political movements that are radically different from each other — I explore how the discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and generation structure disparate political ideologies. Ultimately, I seek to elucidate how the political objectives of each organization cohere around a struggle over the meaning of identity and politics in the emergent South Asian American community.

Long Bui - ltbui@ucsd.edu

B.A.: UCI, Political Science & Asian American Studies
M.A.: Ethnic Studies, UCSD

My study interrogates the discourse of Asian globalization and the idea that rapidly industrializing countries in Asia present the “global future.”  Against the technological associationism attached to this region and its peoples,  my dissertation entitled Global Sightings: The Technologies of Vision in Asia/America investigates the geopolitical aesthetics and thinking of this hi-tech Orientalism by recognizing the (hetero)normative figure of the Asian male engineer/scientist/businessman as one bound up to the queer female Third World worker where the latter constitutes a subordinate ‘partner’ to the former within Asian modernity.

This cartographic yoking ignores the racialized feminization of labor across the world and reifies the contemporary sense of technological rationality. Interweaving queer/feminist theory, critical race studies, visual culture and media communications for examining a range of textual sites from music videos, TV shows, film and documentary, I argue that the Asian female subaltern gives material currency to post-Fordist transfigurations in late capitalism by grounding the abstract cultural geographies necessary for imagining techno-futures in world-historical time.

Dissertation Committee: Yen Le Espiritu (Chair), Denise Ferreira da Silva (Co-chair), Ross Frank. Lisa Lowe (Literature), Ricardo Dominguez (Visual Arts).

Christina Carney - cjcarney@ucsd.edu

Education: BA-UIUC, Interdisciplinary Studies with specializations in Gender Studies & African-American Studies

Mentor: Natalia Molina

Research Interest: African Diaspora, Black Feminist Studies, Brazilian Studies, Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, U.S. & International Public Policy, Law

I am currently conducting legal ethnography and archival research involving Sakia Gunn and 'The New Jersey 4' court cases for my M.A. Generally I am interested how the intersection/intertwining of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geographical location are represented/negotiated/erased within state/federal U.S. courts. The two courts cases involved attacks on Black women from Newark, New Jersey. Because of their positionality as Black, queer, female, and working class their cases were invisible, but also simultaneously hyper-visible. Fifteen year-old Sakia Gunn was killed in 2003 when Richard McCullough (upset that Gunn and her friends would not entertain his sexual advances) attacked and stabbed her. Originally prosecutors tried McCullough’s attack on Gunn as a hate crime, but were forced to reduce the charges to aggravated manslaughter, aggravated assault, and bias intimidation; he was sentenced to a twenty year prison sentence in 2005. Ironically in 2006 classmates of Gunn were also involved in a similar incident involving a heterosexual male who tried to make sexual advances; though with this incident, the women physically fought back in retaliation against the verbal abuses. The women were charged with first-degree assault charges (which carried gang/group attack citations) and received harsh prison sentences. All defendants appealed the decisions; Dandridge’s and Hill’s charges were overturned while Johnson won an appeal and accepted a plea bargain and must now return to prison to finish her prison term. Currently the supposed victim in the incident, Dwayne Buckle, is suing the women for 5 million dollars for what he calls a “straight-hate crime.”

Maria T. Ceseña - mcesena@ucsd.edu

Education:
MA: Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, (2004)
BA: Anthropology, University of California, Riverside (2001)

MA Thesis Title: Negotiating identity, politics, and spirituality: a comparison of two Danza Azteca groups in San Diego, California.

Dissertation Title:
Encased Encounters: Redefining Boundaries of Indigenous Identity in the United States and Mexico

Project Description:
This project employs a historical transnational comparison of parallel programs relating to land holding, self-determination, and cultural recognition as part of Indigenismo in Mexicoand the Indian New Deal in the United States during the first part of the twentieth century, a period that was key in (re)defining relationships between indigenous peoples and the “modern” nation-state.  It then performs a cultural studies analysis of exhibits of contemporary indigenous groups within Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología and the United States’ National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), federally funded institutions that continue to shape perceptions of native peoples, and their relationship with/in the nation-state. Drawing in part on the work of Diana Taylor in the Archive and the Repertoire, I argue that contemporary exhibits do not simply reflect previous policies of inclusion, but do the work of re-envisioning colonial encounters through a discursive restaging of the “discovery” of the Americas from a native perspective. This functions to reverse both the colonial gaze and the burden of proof thrust upon native communities who are forever being forced to clearly demonstrate their “native” status and identity to the rest of the world, which in turn paves the way for a more complex understanding of what constitutes “native” and/or “indigenous” identity and history. Ultimately, this work attempts to elucidate how U.S. and Mexican indigenous identities have been influenced over the years by public discourses about race and nation, as well as through legal and cultural programs that put these discourses into practice.

Susan Chen - suc004@ucsd.edu

BA, Asian Studies, Pomona College, 2002

Reserach Interests: I am interested in examining racial politics and history of the United States through the lens of interethnic relationships. This perspective is to provide a counterpoint to a general tendency in scholarship to frame minority issues primarily in relation to a dominant, oppressive establishment. While the impact of racism can never be discounted from the history of ethnic groups, studies on American ethnicity and race can still continue to benefit from additional works looking at the important ways in which different minority groups shaped each other’s lives, histories, and politics. For my research, I will analyze a highly successful exhibition, “Boyle Heights: The Power of Place,” which opened at the Japanese American National Museum in spring 2003. Using vivid displays of hand-drawn maps and commissioned artwork juxtaposed with photographs, memorabilia, and moving images, “Boyle Heights” depicted a dynamic community where the lives of residents intersected in powerful, unexpected ways. My aim is to look at how the exhibition presented the interethnic history of Boyle Heights and how such representations factor into present-day Boyle Heights, whether this is in regards to neighborhood dynamics, ways of framing and defining the community, how memories of past and present shape each other, and ongoing efforts to preserve elements of community history.

Mentor: Natalia Molina

Martha D. Escobar - mdescoba@ucsd.edu

Mentor: Natalia Molina and Lisa Park, co-Chairs

Dissertation Abstract: This dissertation is an examination of how the institutions of welfare, immigration, and the criminal justice system—including policies, state agents, and discourses—interact to organize the lives of Mexican immigrant women. During the last generation the increased immigration of Mexican immigrant women has coincided with a massive expansion of the U.S. prison system that has developed as a catch-all answer to all forms of deviancy. Immigration is increasingly coupled with criminality, resulting in an increased number of immigrants being imprisoned and an expansion of U.S. immigration detention centers. In the case of Mexican immigrant women, their criminalization is informed in large part from their ability to have children. Notions of who is deserving and undeserving of U.S. membership and belonging influence how immigrants are regarded. Various bodies interact and are involved in shaping U.S. socio-racial formation. These interactions result in imprisonment of immigrant women, their deportation, and in some cases, family separation when children remain in the U.S. In my dissertation project, the oral histories of immigrant women who are or were imprisoned in California will be examined to provide a map of the interactions between state policies, state agents, advocacy organizations, and immigrants and their families. Attention is afforded to the labor that each agency/body performs in organizing the lives of Mexican immigrant women and their families, and in turn shaping U.S. socio-racial formation. I am especially concerned with how ideas of gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship inform their labor.

Jose I. Fusté - jfuste@.ucsd.edu

B.A.: Anthropology, Brown University, 2001
M.A.: Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego, 2006
Mentor: Denise Ferreira da Silva

M.A. Thesis Title:Wall Shadows: The Disciplining and Confinement of Racialized/Gendered Subjects in Puerto Rico's Public Housing Projects

José is currently working on a dissertation tentatively titled Mangrove People: Tracing a Latin Caribbean Subaltern Politics of Relation. The purpose of this is to look at how subaltern subjects in the Latin Caribbean have produced critical engagements with ideas about the nation and racial democracy in a way that has produced a more open ended politics that is simultaneously racial and post-racial, nationalist and post-nationalist, and that can provide us with a politics that can avert colonialism without reproducing neo-colonialism and/or internal colonialism.

Among his broader interests are the comparative study of race, gender, and class in the Caribbean and among Caribbean diasporas. He is also currently looking at critical intersections between post-colonial, subaltern, decolonial, and cultural studies and how these help us gain a better understanding of domination and resistance in our world historically and today.

If you are interested in any of these topics and you would like to learn or teach me more about them, feel free to drop me an email.

Myrna García - MyGarcia@ucsd.edu

B.A., Latin American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
M.S., Education, Administration and Supervision, Fordham University
M.A., Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
Master’s Thesis: Mexican Labor Migrants (Re)Constructing and Contesting Mexicanidad in Chicago

Dissertation Title: Sin Fronteras: Activism, Identity, and Transnational Politics in Mexican Chicago, 1968-1986
Dissertation Committee: David G. Gutiérrez (Co-Chair), Lisa Sun-Hee Park (Co-Chair), Yen Le Espíritu, Natalia Molina, K. Wayne Kang
Dissertation Abstract:

My dissertation investigates how the influx of Mexican immigration from 1968 to 1986 shaped the social dynamics of identity and community formation in the history of Mexicans Chicago. Using the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, I chart how the key strategy of creating mexicanidad [Mexican identity], based on a collectively-imagined Mexico was used by Mexican-Americans and Mexicans to lay claims - or assert a sense of belonging - as a group within the United States during this time period. Pilsen is a key case study because the influx of Mexican immigration spurred a demographic shift that led to a non-citizen majority in this particular neighborhood. Consequently, questions of immigrant rights and issues of political representation became a critical issue in this neighborhood.

This dissertation focuses on the activism of Rudolfo “Rudy” Lozano, a prominent immigrant rights and labor activist who was killed in his home on June 8, 1983 by a gunmen Lozano’s story, el hijo del pueblo [the community’s son], is an important one to tell. He dedicated his life to immigrant rights, and the current movement for immigrant rights in Chicago is a continuation of the movement that Lozano co-created and participated in during the 1970s. He was the co-founder of the Chicago chapter of El Centro de Acción Social Autónomo- Hermandad General de Trabajadores [the Center for Autonomous Social Action- General Brotherhood of Workers] or(CASA-HGT). I argue that the fight for the rights of the undocumented was a necessary step to combat racial discrimination faced by Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike in Chicago. This fight for immigrant rights is one that continues with the current campaign in Chicago today.

Biography: Myrna García is a UC President's Dissertation Fellow, 2008-09

Trangdai Glassey-Tranguyen - ttranguyen@ucsd.edu

B.A., Ethnic Studies & Liberal Studies, CSU Fullerton, 2001
M.A., Cultural Anthropology, Stanford University, 2007

Trangdai Tranguyen commits her life to equality, justice, peace, democratization, and cultural heritages. At CSU Fullerton, she obtained bachelor's degrees in english, adolescent studies, ethnic studies, and liberal studies. She spent 2004-05 in Sweden on a Fulbright fellowship, and holds a master's in anthropology from Stanford University.  Tranguyen has been pursuing studies on Vietnamese Diasporas in North America, Europe, and Asia.  She is interested in how cultures interact, and the discourses of woman trafficking.

 

 

Michelle R. Gutiérrez - m2gutier@ucsd.edu

Mentor: David Pellow

Dissertation Title: Ambivalent Service and a Tenuous Home Front: Latina Women and the US Military

Dissertation Abstract: This dissertation is the first study to center Latina women's relationship to the military. The project reflects the demographic range of Latinas in terms of age, country of origin, and citizenship status and how these factors are constitutive to Latinas' lives as soldiers and as spouses.

Committee: David Naguib Pellow, Co-Chair; Yen Le Espiritu, Co-Chair; Lisa Sun-Hee Park; Natalia M. Molina; George Mariscal

Biography: Gutuérrez is a U.C. President's Dissertation Fellow, 2008-09

Kyung Hee Ha - (khha@ucsd.edu)

Education: BA, Yokohama City U. & MA, SFSU (Ethnic Studies)

Mentor: Adria Imada

Kyung Hee Ha’s work focuses on three related concerns: First, she is interested in studying race/racism/racialization in conjunction with colonialism both in the United States and Japan from a transpacific approach.  Her second concern focuses on the Korean diaspora from an interdisciplinary perspective, including ethnic Koreans from Latin America and China in the United States.  Her third concern involves participation in the growing discussion of civil rights of Zainichi Koreans in Japan.  Kyung Hee hopes to scrutinize the limitation of universal human rights discourse in considering not only race and ethnicity, but also class, gender and other axes of oppressions in a world that is strictly arranged by units of nation-states.

Grace Kim - g4kim@ucsd.edu

White Truths: Objectivity and the (De)Construction of Black-Korean 'Conflict'
Thesis description: This thesis analyzes the discursive construction of the Black-Korean 'conflict'as it was instantiated in the liberal democratic institutional domains of the law and news media just prior, during, and immediately after the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising.

Rebecca J. Kinney - rkinney@ucsd.edu

B.A. American Culture and Sociology, University of Michigan, 2001
M.A. Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2006

Working Dissertation Title: Cartography of Detroit: Mapping Nation, Contesting Global Graveyard

Dissertation Abstract: This dissertation project situates Detroit as a national center and global city. This positioning is in direct relation to Saskia Sassen's (2001) formulation of "global cities." Sassen explores the growth and emergence of thriving global cities and this work extends that process to reveal the production, both figuratively and literally, of global graveyards—emphasizing the role of globalization in creating these
cityscapes as well.   As production and industry keeps moving, global cities grow and shift.  The reverberations of this movement is in the places slated to become the next global graveyard, as stillness comes to cities that have been mined and exploited to the limit—the world structure leaves them as good as dead.  In their figurative and economic demise there is a refusal to acknowledge these spaces as differently manifested global cities. This project emerges out of an interest in studying the ways in which race emerges as a tool of hegemony to hide the realities of globalization.  By examining and locating the violence of borders—local, national, and global—through sites such as the Detroit rebellion of 1967, the beating death of Vincent Chin in 1982, and a local branch of a national community redevelopment organization devoted to youth "rebuilding" Detroit in 2007, I reveal the violence of globalization and the distancing or embracing of tropes of nation in these particular sites.  Through these sites I question how and why race emerges as an inappropriate means of understanding.  A local understanding of Detroit linking to the global processes at work will situate Detroit as a symbolic and productive site of the local, national, and global affects, effects, and responses to a contemporary understanding of globalization.

Dissertation Committee: Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Co-Chair; Natalia Molina, Co-Chair; Luis Alvarez; Yen Le Espiritu; Adria Imada; David Pellow; Roberto Tejada

M.A. Thesis: Mapping Spaces of Citizenship: Locating the Imagined Citizen in San Diego's Asian Pacific Thematic Historic District

Abstract: This thesis, "Mapping Spaces of Citizenship: Locating the Imagined Citizen in San Diego's Asian Pacific Thematic Historic District," interrogates how spatiality produces ideas of who is included and who is excluded in the landscape of citizenship. Specifically my thesis explores the ways in which ideas of race and citizenship are produced within San Diego's Asian Pacific Thematic Historic District (APTHD). Through examining the constructions of legal and social citizenship, I posit the production of the imagined citizen—signifying a state of inclusion that emphasizes the idea of possibility, for people of color to almost "melt" into U.S. social citizenship. Using an interdisciplinary framework I locate the imagined citizen and its inherent impossibility through the physical production of the APTHD. I examine and connect the static reliance upon tropes of multiculturalism, race, difference, and exclusion that are built in this contemporary and non-historic "preservation" of the space. I specifically interrogate the sites of symbolic production, performativity of bodies and space, the tourist gaze, cultural institutions, consumption, and the function of property. Each site illuminates how the imagined citizen is not only produced, but uncovers the impossibility of this rendering as well, underscoring the ways in which this citizen, although imagined, will never become the universal U.S. citizen subject.

Angela Kong - ankong@ucsd.edu

M.A. Counselor Education, San Jose State University
B.A. Psychology, San Jose State University
M.A. Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2007

Working dissertation title: Transformative Diversity in Post-Prop 209: Asian Americans at the University of California

Abstract: My research focuses on how Asian American students challenge the ideology of institutional diversity at University of California, San Diego.  While research studies report the number of white and Asian American students as nearly equivalent at University of California – supporting the model minority myth of the overachieving Asian American, my research challenges the myth through the use of ethnography and discourse analysis foregrounded by the passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative, Proposition 209, eliminating affirmative action in 1996.  I argue that the political positioning of Asian Americans within a discourse around enrollment numbers prevents a critical analysis of a transformative diversity.  Asian American students represent individualism and meritocracy in their perceived success at University of California, however, it is the qualitative impact of racially conscious curriculum, campus climate, and activities created through their participation within the diversity discourse that transforms the university.

Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Olga A. Vásquez, Linda Trinh Võ, K. Wayne Yang

M.A. Thesis: Asian Americans in Ethnic Studies: Diversity in Higher Education

Cathleen Kozen - ckozen@ucsd.edu

B.S.: UCB, Business Administration (Ethnic Studies minor)
M.A., Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2007

Research Interests: Comparative Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, Transnationalism, Historical Theories and Methods, Political Theory on Violence and Justice, Redress and Reparations Theory

Working Dissertation Title: 'Never Again!': Tracing Japanese American Redress and a Politics of Racial Reconciliation as Global Justice

Dissertation Abstract: For my dissertation project, I am interested in how a critical tracing of the idea of Japanese American redress in relation to the present global historical juridical and ethical configurations of late-modernity/(neo)coloniality, U.S. empire and multiculturalism, and an international human rights regime further
opens up new critical possibilities for engaging the questions of"racial justice in the United States" as well as the (im)possibility of human rights as global justice and the broader question of violence, forgiveness and redemption. It asks: If the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 does indeed mark the limit of global justice, how and why is this the case?  What are the political-symbolic effects of Japanese American redress as a global signifier for just who and what constitute the redressable subject and the redressable act of state violence and by extension the object of 'human rights'? Still, how might the signifier itself, in each moment of rearticulation, remain haunted by its own contradictions, by its own impossibility of resolution, and thereby signaling important ruptures and transformative possibilities? In order to address these research questions, an important part of my project is thus to re-conceptualize"Japanese American redress" as an ethical political-symbolic configuration – a constructed, contentious, and contiguous paradigm to be critically interrogated. Specifically, deploying both Foucault's genealogical method and Derrida's notion of deconstruction, I trace the production of "Japanese American redress" – its differential and mutually constituted meanings as they strategically and contingently (re)emerge at the level of the political/symbolic along the postwar terrain of the last sixty plus years. In constructing such a genealogy of Japanese American redress, in examining various sites and juxtaposing their diverse texts, I am interested precisely in the instability of and tensions within such emergences, in the complex
politics of redress and remembering in which meanings and historical knowledge are constantly being negotiated, renegotiated and differentially (re)produced by historical actors located within multiple fields of power.

Dissertation Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Ross H. Frank, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Takashi Fujitani (History), Lisa Yoneyama (Literature)

M.A. Thesis: Achieving the (Im)possible Dream: Japanese American Redress and the Construction of American Justice

M.A. Thesis Abstract: This thesis explores the questions: What do the dominant discourses concerning national redress for past injustices reveal about the politics of construction of historical knowledge? What is the role of redress in the nation-building process, and how is this necessarily a transnational process? Specifically, it examines the official discourse leading up to the passage of the Japanese American redress and reparations bill, the Civil Liberties Act (CLA) of 1988. It argues that the act of redress, rather than bringing closure and resolution to the trauma and violence that was internment and signaling a moment of national, worldwide progress toward racial and social justice, instead actually worked to re inscribe and reinforce the very structures of state violence that sanctioned and perpetrated the internment in the first place. Via the figure of the loyal Nisei soldier and the construction of redress as an act of greatness for a nation, the dominant redress discourse ( re )produces the U.S. nation as a mighty, moral and multicultural nation. At a key moment in the reorganization of the world order, such an articulation provided crucial ideological support for the U.S. to reassert its myths of rescue and rehabilitation and to establish itself as the world's leading military and moral authority a strong voice for freedom across the globe. In short, the re-membering of internment within the dominant redress discourse and the construction of the legislation itself as a moral act of redemption and a performance of multicultural inclusion can be read as a paradigmatic moment of U.S. national formation a re assertion of American exceptionalism on the world stage.

Thesis Committee: Professor Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Lisa Park, Lisa Yoneyama (Literature), Takashi Fujitani (History)

Rashné Limki - rlimki@ucsd.edu

B.A., Politics, Oberlin College (2005)
Mentor: Denise Silva
Areas of Interest: Gender and Ethnicity

Rashne Limki comes from India by way of Oberlin College, where she has engaged in work to understand the rhetoric of resistance to and dismissal of subaltern political stances — particularly in relation to feminist perspectives on human rights — in favor of normalized “western” political logic. From her Personal Statement: "I would therefore like to focus my graduate research on the various forms of violence that affect women and girls during armed conflict, primarily in Third World contexts. In her book, Erotic Justice, Ratna Kapur examines the international discourse on women’s rights as human rights, through various lenses, including domestic violence and trafficking of women. She presents a post-colonial feminist critique of “victimization rhetoric” which pervades international human rights discourse and casts the Third World woman as “the real, or most authentic, victim subject.” Using anti-essentialist analyses of gender and culture, Kapur advocates for a rights framework that recognizes the agency and resistance exercised by women. Through my research, I would like to extend this argument to women affected by armed conflict, and examine how national and international laws that are meant to protect women’s human rights can be strengthened to create an emancipatory women’s rights platform. In order to achieve this goal, I wish to build the theoretical knowledge and analytical skills necessary to effectively navigate international legal and political systems." Limki has worked on a number of innovative research projects, including independent study of the politics surrounding women’s education in pre-and post-war Iraq. She worked with first-hand accounts of how political rhetoric, which often casts women as victim subjects in need of liberation, effectively obscures their agency in resistance and survival. She has also had a varied activist career at Oberlin.

Angela Morrill - atmorrill@ucsd.edu

B.A.: University of Oregon, Ethnic Studies

Advisor: Ross Frank

Research Interests: Comparative Indigeneity, Native Feminisms, Cultural Performance and Social Theory

MA Thesis: "Decolonizing Klamath Termination: Critiquing Factionalism in Klamath Termination Discourse" Scholarly books and articles about termination describe the Klamath as factionalized and this representation leads to at least partial blame for termination. Scholars suggest if the Klamath were able to work together and come to consensus, a different outcome may have been possible. Termination not only cost the Klamath their inheritance but led to cultural loss and the unfortunate belief by many that the Klamath sold their reservation and voted to give up their identity as Klamath tribal members. My paper argues factionalism is based on the racist representation of the American Indian as savage and unable to effectively govern themselves. It does not describe a community self-destructing but a community with different strategies toward a common goal: self-determination. Describing the Klamath as factionalized and blaming termination on one faction hides the main reason for termination of the Klamath. It was not the fault of the minority of tribal members seeking to liquidate the tribe and release themselves from federal supervision but the 800,000 acres of land they owned that made them a target for this short lived and destructive federal policy.

Kit Myers - kmyers@ucsd.edu

B.A., Ethnic Studies and Journalism, University of Oregon (2006)
Mentor:  Natalia Molina
Areas of Interest: Asian American studies, Adoption and Foster care, Health and Immigration Policy, and Transnationalism.

Other areas of interest: the beach, ping pong, fussball, soccer, billiards, and ESPN.

My project is concerned with race and adoption and will (tentatively) examine the relationship among transnational transracial (read Asian), domestic transracial (read black), and domestic white adoptions. The first part will look at late nineteenth century anti-miscegenation laws, the U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, and the 1904 Arizona orphan abduction to map a genealogy that links these seemingly disparate points in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which the “ideal” US family has been determined by racialization and anti-miscegenation laws to be racially pure and white, i.e. miscegenation was not allowed in the family through marriage or adoption.

The second part will examine the 1955 passage of the “Relief of certain Korean war orphans” Bill, commonly known as the “Holt Bill,” as a strategic shift by the state and new adoption supporters in which the imagination of the US family was reconstructed and seemingly expanded through transnational adoption and partial miscegenation of the family. Further, I will also look at why this strategic shift in the 1950s is troubled and disrupted by the dismal dynamics of transracial adoption of black babies in the US.

Marilisa Navarro (m3navarro@ucsd.edu)

Education: B.A., Journalism and Mass Media, Rutgers University
M.A., Sociology, San Diego State University

Mentor: K. Wayne Yang

Research Interests: Cultural production: the social, economic and political circumstances that create a space for groups to produce culture, how groups go about producing culture, whether these forms are resistant to hegemonic ideologies, how these forms are perceived by external groups/larger society, if/how they are co-opted; also labor, education, social movements, immigration, and how they intersect with issues of race, class, and gender.

Madel Tmetuchl Ngiraingas - mngirain@ucsd.edu

B.A., Women Studies; B.A., History, Washington State University.

Mentor: Yen Espiritu

M.A. Thesis: Commemorating a “Modern” Past: (Re)Making Memories of Liberation and Independence in the Republic of Belau.

My thesis examines the ways in which the recent commemorations of and the material circumstances surrounding three major Belauan events—the Liberation of Belau/WWII Memorial, Constitution Day, and Independence Day—have shaped and influenced Belauan national identity “within” and “outside” of the South Pacific Island of Belau. Specifically, my thesis scrutinizes the apparent contradiction between the actual unfolding of those historical moments and the ways in which Belauans memorialize them today. Much of my research explores the shifting/transformation of and the movement/interaction/relationship between identity, space and the nation.

Related Interests: Indigenous/Pacific Islander discourse related to decolonization and militarism; indigenous/native identity, rights and sovereignty; critical race and transnational feminist theory.

Linh Nguyen - ngocnga@ucsd.edu

B.A., Women's Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Mentor: Yen Le Espiritu

Research Interests: Linh Nguyen explores how the self-reflexive nature of autoethnography exposes the deeply personal and political experience of identity and memory for minority subjects. Drawing from autoethnographic work, she combined a love for digital and video media with theoretical work in post modern, feminist and film theory. For her graduate work, she is interested in how diasporic migrations have formed social and ethnic relations within the United States in very marked ways. Furthermore, she would like to further explore the ways that gender and class inform identity, power relations, discourse, as well as the experience of trauma and the act of remembering and of memory itself.

Ngoc Nga T. Nguyen - ngocnga@ucsd.edu

M.A. Thesis Abstract: In this thesis, I contextualize the U.S. military's Agent Orange spraying in the Viet Nam War, also known as "Operation Ranch Hand" with an emphasis on the racial discourse. As contrary to the dominant Western narrative, my analysis does not project Agent Orange spraying on civilian bodies and their habitats as a justifiable act. Rather, I contend that the U.S.' military conduct of war functions as a form of larger nation-state policies, which regards the bodies and surrounding of the Vietnamese as extensively expendable. This expendability is evidenced through my trans-historical analysis of U.S. Empire and its war-making policies that is linked with the racialization of various populations, such as the Native-Americans, Filipinos, and the Vietnamese. I also focus on the Agent Orange chemical warfare spraying in Viet Nam and its relationship to the environment racism discourse. Significantly, I textualize the Western post-war visual representation of Agent Orange war victims in Viet Nam that continues to place the Viet Nam populace as the racialized Third World "Other" in Philip Jones Griffiths' (2003) photo book, "Agent Orange: 'Collateral Damage' In Viet Nam."

Dissertation Project: My dissertation work continues as an expansion of my M.A. Thesis addressing U.S. militarist actions of Agent Orange chemical toxic spraying during the U.S./Viet Nam war within the contextualization of nation-state hood discourse. The crux of the theoretical scope remains within the racial context with the specific aspects shifting towards the role of law and science in regards to the Vietnamese Agent Orange court case dismissal verdict.  This shift coincides with the specific re-consideration of the outcome or dismissed verdict reached by U.S. judge Jack Weinstein due to “lack of scientific evidence.”  The reconsideration (of the official court case verdict) is, I suggest, necessary in the interest of further exploring how nation-state power is exercised not only through military force but also in law and science discourses. Bringing the focus towards the examination of the roles of science and law for a better understanding towards the socio-politico dimensions of what is pre-dominantly believed to be a field divorced from those dimensions. More importantly, using these specific points of examination that constitutes the body of my dissertation thesis will ultimately draw the link between law, science, and militarism, conveying how these vital aspects represent the trans-historical working of U.S. nation-state power in relation to war issues within the global context of the twenty-first century.

Committee: Denise Silva, Chair; Yen Espiritu, Co-Chair; Ross H. Frank; Lisa Yoneyama; Lan Duong (UCR)

Monique Paes - mpaes@ucsd.edu

B.A., English from Mount Holyoke College
M.Ed., Education, Culture and Society, University of Utah.

Mentor: Denise Silva

Monique Paes emigrated from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil at the age of 7 to live in Queens, NY with her single-mother. Her experiences in NYC public schooling fueled her desire to one day be an effective educator that would shift the paradigms of normativity in the areas of identity, race and class.  As a "Third-world" feminist, her research interests lie in critical race feminism as well as Latino/a studies. Currently, her research entails the syncretism of the body consciousness in areas of Afro-Brazilian/Chicana studies.  Monique is also a painter and a spoken word artist.

Candice Tamika Rice - ctrice@ucsd.edu

B.A., Ethnic Studies, Humbolt State University (2006)
A.A. Liberal Arts, Los Angeles Community College (2003)
Areas of Interest: State violence, race and racism in the U.S, poverty, public policy and welfare, Black and Chicano studies, immigration, urban communities and city spaces, gender and families, prisons, people of color resistance to white supremacy

MA Thesis (Working Title): “Deconstructing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Rebuilding Los Angeles Post 1992”

This thesis is a critical examination of government commissioned reports after the uprisings of 1965 and 1992 in Los Angeles and offers an analysis of the discourse in the reports, especially as it relates to rebuilding efforts and other legislative efforts in South Central. Specifically, this study is concerned with the material effects of such discourse on poor Black and Latina women and children.    

MA Thesis Committee: Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Natalia Molina, Roberto Alvarez

Stevie Ruiz - srruiz@ucsd.edu

B.A., History, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, 2004
M.A., Latin American Studies, San Diego State University, 2007

Areas of Interest: I am interested in third world women’s activism along the US-Mexico border, the politics of remembering, global capitalist economies and immigration. Specifically, my research examines how Mexican women along the US frontier have politicized the memory of dead border crossers through public acts of commemoration and collective action. Some of the major research questions I am interested in relate to the discourse of the disposable Mexican worker, nation, patriarchy, the fight for public space, performances of memory, and imagined communities.

Other areas of interests include women’s relationship to the city, geographies of hate, masculinity, and mainstream racist movements in the United States.

M.A. Thesis Proposal: Paradoxes, Race, and Geographies of Fear in the Borderlands (Working title)

This thesis is an effort to examine how the liberal state and popular culture work in tandem to create racial and sexual anxieties in the borderlands.  Using early twentieth century murder, rape and sodomy trials in San Diego and Imperial Valley as my sites of analysis, I excavate how newspapers and sensational trials discursively map Punjabi, Mexican and white migrants’ mixed-race kinships, intimate violence and homosocial spaces as abnormal and perverted. Centering my critique on the spatial management of non-heteronormative domesticities, I consider how ethnic studies scholars might move against the grain, directing their attention towards a radical imaginary that conceptualizes kinship without the sexual, racial and gendered police enforcement of the liberal state.

Thesis Committee: Natalia Molina (Chair), Roberto Alvarez, Nayan Shah (History)

Ayako Sahara - asahara@ucsd.edu

B.A., Ritsumeikan University (2001); M.A., University of Tokyo (2004)
Mentor:  Yen Le Espiritu
Areas of Interest: American and Vietnamese History

Ayako Sahara has studied Vietnamese language and history in Vietnam and is interested in studying Vietnamese communities in the US from the perspective of Vietnam as one of the outcomes of the civil war. In her Masters thesis work she focused on how the attitudes of the Vietnamese diaspora in America formed. She wishes to research Vietnamese exiles in America in terms of anti-Communist activities among Vietnamese in America, the meaning of the American evacuation from Vietnam for Vietnamese exiles, and to think about the constructions of “South Vietnam” as a historical subject. From her statement:
The subject of my study is a historical reconsideration of the Vietnam War, from the view of Vietnamese exiles in the United States. I am interested in how the Vietnam War continues to shape the relationship between the Vietnamese American community and Vietnam. There are primarily two reasons why I came to have an interest in the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The first resulted from my homestay experience in Canada that led me to major in European and American history at Ritsumeikan University. The second results from my experience living in Vietnam.
Since 2004, while working on her research, language training, and at the University of Tokyo’s Center for Pacific and American Studies, Sahara has been active in the Vietnamese Children’s Foundation, a Japanese NGO which offers scholarships to Vietnamese students.

Seth San Juan - ssanjuan@ucsd.edu

B.A., Political Science, UCSD, 2003
M.A. Native American Studies, University of Arizona, 2006

Seth San Juan brings three diverse but related research interests: First, he is intrigued by the applicability of postcolonial theory to Native American literature. His earlier work focused on post-colonialism in Helen Hunt-Jackson’s Ramona. Second, he is interested in the Mexico-U.S. border from the point of view of Indigenous American communities. And, his third interest centers on the migration of Yaqui people in California, Arizona, and Mexico. Seth’s proposed research project incorporates a critical theoretical perspective on the construction of the categories of nation, citizenship, and race/ethnicity in the Mexico-U.S. border region.

Mentor: Denise Ferreira da Silva

Leila Sharif - lsharif@ucsd.edu

B.A: Sociology with Honors. UC Berkeley (2006)
MA: Sociology, UC San Diego (2008)

Research Interests: Race, Diaspora Studies, Refugees, Cultural Production, Social Movements

Mentor: Roshaenk Kheshti
Advisor: Yen Le Espiritu

Lila Sharif is a Palestinian-American dual Ph.D. student in the departments of Sociology and Ethnic Studies. Her research questions are:
how do exiles, refugees, and migrants construct the memory of their homeland? How is the homeland imagined in relation to the historic and current realities of occupation, war, trauma, and colonization, for these diasporic youths? Using interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies methodologies in order to interrogate the intersections of race, class, and gender, Sharif’s dissertation project will attempt to address the experiences of stateless refugees and exiles who are seen as not belonging to any nation, and are thus on the political and cultural margins of both their homeland and host countries, looking particularly at Palestinian youth. Sharif examines how Palestinian refugee and diasporic youths have formed cultural and political collectives centered at the liberation of their homeland.
Her dissertation project seeks to trace the genealogy of these cultural and political sites for Palestinian refugee youth in order to examine how the imagination of the homeland is tightly bound to a history and contemporary reality of the racial subjugation, political marginalization, and cultural fragmentation for Palestinians, and how this has transferred onto US soil. She also wishes to show how these sites can be spaces of hope in which the collective production of memory and history produces multiple homeland narratives, and are thus filled with possibilities.

In her Master’s thesis, Sharif argues that in many areas in the United States, refugee and diasporic Palestinian youths use sites of cultural production to challenge their position as simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, highly racialized political subjects both within the US and global contexts. Utilizing in-depth interview methods with refugee and diasporic youth, as well as ethnographic field methods, Sharif examines local debkah circles in San Diego to ask how Palestinian diasporic youths, including refugees, construct their homeland. Debkah, now considered to be the national dance of Palestine, literally means “stomping of the feet” in Arabic and is a popular folk dance that originates in the Levantine region. By tracing the dance from its cultural origins to its newly imbued political significance, she aims to understand how it is claimed by these youth as a political site that actively constructs the homeland through performances.

Davorn Sisavath - dsisavat@ucsd.edu

B.A., political science, San Jose State University
M.A., Asian American Studies, San Francisco State University

Mentor: Natalia Molina

Research Interests: Utilizing linguistically- and culturally-sensitive ethnography and in-depth interviews, Sisavath’s ground-breaking MA thesis examines the oft-overlooked lives of young teen mothers in the Laotian community in the Central Valley, paying particular attention to how they negotiate and manage motherhood within and outside their family and community. For her dissertation work, she hopes to explore the relationship between history and memory and its impact on 1.5 and second generation children of refugee parents. Sisavath has published a piece on Laotian Americans for the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (Sage, 2008), and another on Lao and Hmong Veterans for a forthcoming encyclopedia, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today.

Juliana Smith - jjs002@ucsd.edu

Research Interests: Race, Black Radical Thought, Exile, Social Movements, Prison Industrial Complex

Mentors: David Pellow, Denise Ferreira da Silva

MA Thesis:  The Cultural Dynamic of the Prison Industrial Complex:  A Critique of Political Rhetoric and Popular Film During the 1980’s

Thesis Abstract:  Prisons are places that disproportionately house the poor, the working class, and people of color of this country.  While what has been deemed ‘the prison industrial complex’ has been said to serve a number of purposes--a financial project for the state and private companies, a permanent counterrevolution, a place to house surplus labor populations, a place to punish ‘criminals’ or a means to create a “safer” society--it functions in part because American culture encourages and normalizes its presence.  This thesis seeks to give credence to the idea that the prison industrial complex is more than its political and economic tentacles. The prison industrial complex is also a cultural phenomenon worthy of study.  This thesis examines cultural artifacts from the moment of the 1980’s, including Ronald Reagan’s political campaigns and films such as Colors, Menace II Society, Boyz N the Hood and Clockers. The main argument herein is that during the 1980’s there were rich visual, written, spoken and cultural discourses that implicitly and explicitly buttressed the need for incarceration and prison, normalizing its presence as a way to solve social and economic problems. 

My next project examines the lives of Black activists who have self exiled from the U.S. and are now living in Cuba. This project recalls an overall history of self-exile within the black radical tradition.  I document how radical activists, who have been forced in one way or another to leave the U.S., reconcile and negotiate leaving “the struggle,” home, and family.  Understanding the experience of those whose political freedom dreams in U.S. social movements have separated is a chapter in U.S. history that recalls horrific stories of state repression, and reexamines the logic of violent struggle for decolonization and freedom.

Thea Quiray Tagle - ttagle@ucsd.edu

B.A., Political Science and Human Rights Studies, Barnard College (2004)

Mentor:  Pal Ahluwalia

Previous Research (undergraduate): hybrid identities of South African-born Chinese youth in Cape Town; Filipina/American transnational social movements; Asian diasporas in the US, Latin America, and Africa; experimental documentary film

Current research interests: queer Filipina/American cultural production; cultures of consumption and the consumption of culture; passing; queer of color diasporas; domesticity; postcolonial feminist theory; critical pedagogy.

Blog: The Cult of Pop (http://cultofpop.blogspot.com)

Graduate Community Coordinator for 2007-2008 grad-community@ucsd.edu

Tomoko Tsuchiya - ttsuchiy@ucsd.edu

B.A.: Japan Women’s University, English Literature/ American Studies
M.A.: Japan Women’s University, American Studies
M.A.: University of California, San Diego, Ethnic Studies
Fulbright Recipient

MA thesis title: Japanese War Brides: Liberated by Imperial Love.

Working Dissertation Title: “Does Love Compensate with Violent Marriages?”: Japanese War Bride as Liberated/Dangerous Woman

My dissertation will examine marriages between American GIs and Japanese women as a result of the American occupation of Japan. This project argues that the “Japanese war brides” who married American GIs in postwar periods become contradictory subjects within the political process of U.S.-Japan alliance building. My project will be the first to demonstrate the comprehensive processes by which the contradictory subject of the “Japanese war bride” works to build and reinforce postwar U.S.-Japan alliance. In broader terms, this study will offer a critique of America’s dominant memory of WWII as a “good war,” Japan’s historical amnesia regarding its colonialism, and the language of “liberation,” “peace,” and “love” which the postwar U.S.-Japan alliance holds and preserves. I also engage the possibilities of different kinds of the “Japanese war bride” subjects who emerged out of the interstices between liberalism’s universal promise of love and the historical context of the war and occupation. This project historicizes the discursive moments when the “Japanese war bride” subjects were produced and articulated, and situates them back into the context of postwar occupation.

Most scholars have discussed the “Japanese war brides” as part of postwar immigrant groups to the U.S. and consequently viewed as subjects to be assimilated into U.S. society. They tended to only focus on their cultural transformation whereby American white middle-class values and practices become the ultimate goal and thus regard their Japanese cultural attributes as undesirable and in need of obliteration. Since the multiculturalism became a popular framework in the U.S., other scholars came to see their preservation of Japanese culture was necessary. However, they have not interrogated how racial and cultural differences have been constructed. This project does not assume the natural existence of the “Japanese war brides” who have been understood primarily through an assimilationist framework within the U.S. Instead, my work discusses how “Japanese war brides” were made into legible subjects within the political processes of U.S.-Japan alliance building. Here, I am particularly interested in how the “Japanese war bride” was constructed as a category of difference in order to serve Cold War alliance building. By reading what constitutes the “Japanese war bride” as visible and legible, this project reveals how notions of “love,” “liberation,” and “peace” were constructed through the transformation of national relations from wartime to postwar.

Dissertation Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Ross H. Frank, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Takashi Fujitani (History), Lisa Yoneyama (Literature)

Ma Vang - mvang@ucsd.edu

B.S., Univ. Oregon Honors College, Ethnic Studies & General Science
M.A., Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2007

M.A. Thesis: The Refugee Soldier Figure: Secrets, War, and Empire; Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Ross H. Frank, Takashi Fujitani (History)

Research Interests: Critical Hmong Studies, Refugee Studies, Southeast Asians in the Diaspora, Race & Gender, Transnationalism, Asian American studies, US Imperialism & War, Nation & Citizenship.

Working Dissertation Title: The Refugee Soldier Figure: Toward a Stateless Refugee Perspective

Dissertation Abstract: My dissertation proposes to rethink the refugee as a troubling moral political figure, through centralizing statelessness, to open up the categories of nation and citizenship. I situate my research in a study of Hmong refugees and the context of the “secret war” in Laos (1961-1975) during the US war in Vietnam, interrogating the nexus of Hmong critical involvement as “allied,” “guerrilla” soldiers fighting for US democracy—recruited because they are categorized as stateless, lacking in geopolitical territory—and as a displaced people in the aftermath of the US defeat. I formulate this crucial nexus as the refugee soldier figure: a conjoining of the national and transnational, and a strategic pairing of the hyper-masculinized soldier who fought abroad and the hyper-feminized refugee who inhabits and haunts the domestic space.  Hmong refugees/Americans constitute a paradigmatic case study about the intersectionality of the refugee, soldier, and stateless figures to decentralize the nation-state and its subject, the citizen. Through a study of the US’s convoluted response to several emerging and urgent issues within the Hmong refugee/American community, such as the veterans’ naturalization legislation and the naming of Hmong as terrorists, my research will explore how the configuration of refugee and stateless status signify the crisis that threatens the nation-state.

Dissertation Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Ross H. Frank; Denise Ferreira da Silva; Lisa Yoneyama, Takashi Fujitani

Traci B. Voyles - tvoyles@ucsd.edu

B.A., Ethnic Studies (University of Colorado, Boulder, 2003)
M.A., Ethnic Studies (University of California San Diego, 2005)
M.A. Thesis Title: "Home Birth: Race, Reproduction, and Patriarchy in Alternative Childbirth in San Diego"

Research Interests: My primary interests as a scholar revolve around the interplay of racialization, gender, and sexuality with landscape, space and geography, environmental justice, cultural productions, militarization, and post/coloniality. My work explores the intersections and overlaps in literatures such as transnational feminist theory, deconstructionist cartography, US Southwest and border studies, social geography, indigenous studies, and racialization theory.

In my dissertation project, I explore the militarization of the US Southwest region from the beginning of the Manhattan Project through the present. In particular, I am interested in exploring disproportionate location of uranium mines on and directly adjacent to indigenous lands in Arizona and New Mexico. The health implications of mining and mine sites certainly make this a critical case of environmental racism and a site of environmental justice struggle. However it also generates rich analytic inroads to questions of sovereignty, the racialization of lands and geographies, and the role of gender and sexuality in colonial violence. I see land itself as part of a human, social geography of power and domination, of colonialism and warfare; therefore land itself, as both ideological and material construction, operates intersectionally and co-constitutively with other nodes of subjection (race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship). Dissertation Working Title: “At Home on the Front End: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Militarized Environmental Racism”

Abstract: This paper examines the militarization of uranium, with particular focus on the ways in which uranium mining in the US Southwest reveals the intersectionality of gender, race, sexuality, and nature in the service of the military industrial complex. Uranium mining and uranium-based weapons have played key roles in US militarism during both the Cold War and the War on Terror. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the present, much of the uranium obtained by the government for military use has come from indigenous lands in the US Southwest; to a large extent, Native miners have lived and labored at the “front end” of the nuclear cycle during a critical historical moment in the development of US political, economic, and military global hegemony. This project draws connections between the local histories of uranium mining in indigenous North American communities to the global implications of US neo/colonial power, working from a critical feminist transnational and intersectional analysis. To that end, I focus on the sexual, gender, and racial components of militarism, and particularly nuclear militarism, as well as the role of nature, environment, and what is nonhuman in the construction of social realities and structures of neo/colonial power. The paper argues that the history of uranium mining in the US Southwest is highly gendered and sexualized—not only because it impacts women’s lives differently from men’s but also because, as argued by a number of feminist theorists, environmental racism can often be understood as a form of sexual violence against racialized communities and environments. I argue that the gendered and sexualized nature of US colonization of indigenous North American communities as well as the toxic and radioactive impacts of uranium mining on women’s bodies and socially constructed gender roles make this a critical investigation into the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and nature in the function of US militarism.

Angelica Yanez - ayanez@ucsd.edu

B.A., U.C. Santa Barbara (2004)

Mentor:  Lisa Sun-Hee Park

Areas of Interest: Chicana/o Studies and Women’s Studies

Thesis (Working Title): The Brown Berets and Black Panthers as Active Agents of Cultural Affirmation and Social Resistance

Themes: Social resistance, community activism, inclusive and relevant educational practices for Chicanos and Blacks, identity formation, and culture as political.

Abstract: I will argue that the lasting impact of the Brown Berets and Black Panthers of the 1960s is a positive affirmation of both a cultural and racial identity. Both organizations had political ideologies that were intimately linked to the generation of an oppositional culture that led to critical consciousness and identity formation. I will emphasis that culture is political and functions as a form of resistance to a hegemonic white social order.

In this thesis I will examine the political ideologies and educational programs of the Black Panther Party and the Brown Berets. The Political ideologies of these groups were crucial to identity formation. These new identity formations led to an oppositional consciousness about American society and the use of the labels “Mexican American” and “Negro”. As a result of this shift in consciousness new identity labels emerged. These new labels, Chicano and Black, had direct political meanings. They defined themselves against an imposed white identity or mentality. Both groups embraced cultural affirmations as they excavated a connection to the history and homelands of Mexico and Africa . Members of the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets understood the importance of this oppositional consciousness and explicated it through their educational programs and community activism. Furthermore, these educational programs would later lay the groundwork for Chicano and Black studies programs across college campuses nation-wide.

Ethnic Studies Ph.D. Alumni

 

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