This is a hybrid event: in-person and online.
Watch the video of the lecture here.

Register for Zoom webinar: https://bit.ly/Kim-Webinar
RSVP for reception: https://bit.ly/4033mp6

A reception will follow (5-6 p.m.) Prof. Kim's talk, organized by the Race and Ethnicity Working Group of the UCLA Department of Sociology.

Event description:
"Refusing Death" examines race, class, gender and citizenship with respect to the growing social phenomenon of marginalized and unauthorized immigrants – especially women and youth – making political inroads by way of grassroots activism, at times, sidestepping the need for formal political channels. By way of nearly four years of ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and documents analysis of Asian American and Latin@ environmental justice activism in the industrial-port belt of Los Angeles, she finds that these mostly female immigrant activists view their work as much more than an effort to spare their children’s lungs from the gray plumes of cargo ships and oil refineries; they are also redefining notions of politics, community, and citizenship in the face of America’s nativist racism and its system of class injustice, defined by disproportionate pollution and neglected schools, surveillance/deportation, and political marginalization.

By inventively dovetailing all of these dimensions, the women show that they are highly conscious of how environmental and educational harms are an assault on their bodies and emotions; hence, they center embodied and affective strategies to uniquely challenge the neoliberal state’s neglect and betrayal and, ultimately, to refuse death.

Speaker bio:
Nadia Y. Kim (@profnadiakim) is a Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies (and by courtesy, Sociology) at Loyola Marymount University. Her research focuses on US race and citizenship injustices concerning Korean/Asian Americans and South Koreans, race and nativist racism in Los Angeles (e.g., 1992 LA Unrest), immigrant women activists, environmental racism and classism, and comparative racialization of Latinxs, Asian Americans, and Black Americans. She is the author of the multi-award-winning "Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA" (Stanford, 2008); the multi-award-winning "Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA" (Stanford, Spring 2021); and of award-winning journal articles on race and assimilation and on racial attitudes. She is also co-editor of "Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic & Indigenous Studies" (NYU Press, forthcoming).

Kim has given public lectures, consulted, and organized on issues of immigrant rights, affirmative action, and environmental justice and her work has been profiled on National Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, Red Table Talk, Radio Korea, and local TV news and in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Korea Times, NYLON Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.

Organizers: UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UCLA Labor Studies Program, International Development Studies program of the UCLA International Institute

Co-sponsors: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, UCLA Department of Asian American Studies, UCLA Center for the Study for Women, Race and Ethnicity Working Group of the UCLA Department of Sociology