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Clarito (Bing) Aradanas - caradana@weber.ucsd.edu

Mentor: David Pellow

My research focuses on Filipino identity, based on retrieval of ancient Philippine culture and deconstruction of colonial history in the Philippines from a cultural and spiritual - as opposed to political - perspective.

Abstract: This thesis interrogates how certain young Filipino Americans (“Fil-Ams”) produce cultures of resistance given the experience of centuries of racism and colonization in the Philippines, with an emphasis toward their engagement with the U.S. colonial legacy. First I examine various critical theoretical concepts in my introduction and overview. Next I examine two major examples of explicit cultural productions through the prisms of those concepts in order to interrogate the theoretical complexities involved as young Fil-Ams seek to resist elements of colonialism in their quest to assert a more meaningful sense of identity.

Committee: David Pellow, Chair; Roberto Alvarez, Yen Le Espiritu, Ross Frank

Research Interests: My goal is not to deny Filipino heritage that is colonial, only to give voice and contour to a deliberately silenced, marginalized and dehumanized part of their heritage. I will argue that the young Fil-Ams whose cultural productions I examine seek a sense of cultural rootedness – what Leny Mendoza Strobel calls a “life-giving source” – that more fully humanizes them and their previously dehumanized ancestors by meaningfully and spiritually linking them to a specific portion of their heritage which they perceive has been long denied and repressed by the processes of colonialism.

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.

Michael Lujan Bevacqua - mbevacqua@ucsd.edu

Mentors: Yen Espiritu & Denise Silva

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: Everything Chamorro, anything Guam, all things Zizek. Patriotic blowback, decolonization in the Pacific, death/suicide and hegemony, the nation and its (dis)contents, anime and the limits of the human, indigenous Lacanianism, sovereignty and the daily routes of its (re)production, contemporary (post) Marxism and the role of revolution, zones of insulated whiteness, everyday language revitalization

Current research projects/papers: The Materiality and Fantasies of Empire: The Case of Guam; The Decision and Human Instrumentality: Lacan Avec Evangelion, or Why Immanuel Kant Never Dated; Things to Do in Guam When You're Dead; The Unexceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam; The Consuming Sovereign: Global Nationalism and the Production of American Sovereignty (with Theofanis Verinakis); The Void at the Edge of the Human: The Ethics of Spike Spiegel versus The Lone World and Cub.

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

Dissertation: Something about Guam and Chamorros.

• Miget's Blog 
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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

Mentors: Denise Silva & Lisa Park

My dissertation examines the intersection of diaspora, technoculture, queer theory and media studies. Through a range of popular texts, I interrogate how the Asian/American subject figures within the symbolic-discursive space of (post)modernity, particularly in such a way that the current global economy depends on a virtual as well as material configuration of the subaltern Asian female body.  As such, this project excavates racial representation within shifting historical contexts and ontological conditions.

Christina Carney - (Entering Fall 2008)

Maria T. Ceseña - mcesena@ucsd.edu

I am interested in the aspect of race in education and the United States unwritten law which promotes a single American-ness among school-age children. Specifically I am interested in the politics involved with the defeat of Affirmative Action and Bilingual education programs. My dissertation topic looks at the representations of indigenous groups in Mexico and the United States with an emphasis on museum culture.

Theresa Cenidoza Suarez

Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Lisa Sun-Hee Park; Ana Celia Zentella; John D. Blanco; Nayan B. Shah

Biography: Theresa Cenidoza Suarez is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race Studies in the Department of Sociology at California State University, San Marcos

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: Lisa Sun-Hee Park

Martha D. Escobar - mdescoba@weber.ucsd.edu

Mentor: Lisa Park

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

Comparative study of race, culture, and power among Latin Caribbean populations
Mentor: Denise Silva

I am currently working on my M.A. thesis project titled Wall Shadows: The Disciplining and Confinement of Racialized/Gendered Subjects in Puerto Rico's Public Housing Projects . Through this project, I trace how Puerto Ricans as a colonized people have created multiple positionalities of power inside the Puerto Rican colony. I attempt to give a different perspective as to why Puerto Rican society today particularly in San Juan is so violently polarized. How do commonly held intersecting ideas about race, gender, and class produce hierarchies of power in San Juan ? How do these supposed truths' contribute to San Juan 's poverty and violence? Who or what constructs these truths? Why have anti-colonial discourses failed to create a radical consciousness against the economic marginalization and exclusion of San Juan's and Puerto Rico's poor majority?

Besides looking at race, gender, culture, and power among Latin Caribbean populations, my other interests include: critical social theory, theories of how space/time reproduce social inequality, decolonization of knowledge, developing a decolonial ethics, creating new forms of socialist democratic politics, critical theories of culture, Latin American and Caribbean politics, history, and archaeology, Latin Caribbean philosophies and spiritualities (particularly Mesa Blanca Spiritism, Regla de Ocha and Ifá), and the cultural politics of Latin-Caribbean musical forms and dances.

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.

Eugene Gambol - egambol@weber.ucsd.edu

B.A., UC Irvine (2002);
M.A., San Francisco State (2006)
Mentor: Lisa Park
Areas of interest: Filipino American Social Movements

In my research, I am interested in the experiences of contemporary Filipino American youth who have taken it upon themselves to learn about their Filipino culture, organize in their local communities around the ongoing issue of human rights violations in the Philippines. It is these historical moments and geo-political sites of activism that creates dialogue and meanings of culture and politics in the Filipino American community. I draw from theoretical frameworks of exile, diaspora and transnationalism to understand the ambiguities and contradictions of activism in the Filipino American community. Through personal, local and global identity political epistemologies, I challenge ideas of the nation-state, sovereignty and citizenship in order to deconstruct hegemony and inequality in the Filipino American community. I look at the political, economic and social conditions in the Philippines during and after American colonization in order to understand the phenomena of large number of Filipino emigrants throughout the world. I focus on the Filipino American diaspora to explicate the genealogy of culture and politics left by American colonization. From the colony to the metropole, I hope to elucidate the progress or rather regress of American democracy in the Philippines and its colonial relationship to the development of a collective and empowered Filipino American community.

Myrna García - mygarcia@weber.ucsd.edu

B.A. Latin American Studies, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
M.S. Education, Administration and Supervision, Fordham University
M.A., Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

M.A. Thesis title: Mexican Labor Migrants (Re)Constructing and Contesting Mexicanidad in Chicago

Dissertation Title: Identity, Community, and Mexican Immigration: Creating and Contesting Mexicanidad in Chicago, 1968 – 1986

Dissertation Abstract: My dissertation investigates how the influx of Mexican immigration during the 1970s shaped the social dynamics of identity and community formation in the history of ethnic Mexicans in Chicago. An influx of Mexican immigration to Chicago during the 1970s ushered in an era of immigration that continues to rise in the United States. For instance, undocumented Mexican immigration increased because the immigration acts of 1965, implemented in 1968, legally restricted Mexican immigration to the United States as the number of visas allocated to Mexico was sharply reduced due to the institution of the hemispheric quotas. Using the neighborhood of Pilsen as a case study, my dissertation project investigates how ethnic Mexicans engaged with and contested mexicanidad," 'a feeling of common peoplehood' based on a collectively-imagined Mexico" in everyday life (Arredondo 1999).I center my study on Pilsen because in 1970 this neighborhood was the first to have a Mexican majority in Chicago. Further, the influx of Mexican immigration spurred a demographic shift that led to a non-citizen majority in this particular neighborhood during this decade. My investigation ends in 1986 as amnesty was granted to groups of undocumented people with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act.

Dissertation Committee: Lisa Sun-Hee Park (Chair), David G. Gutiérrez (Co-Chair), Natalia Molina, K. Wayne Yang, Yen Le Espiritu

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.

 

Monika Gosin - mgosin@ucsd.edu

B.A. Social Science/ Spanish Literature, University of California , Irvine , 1995.
M.A. Sociology, Arizona State University, 1998.
M.A. Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego , 2004.

Research Interests: African Diaspora, Latino Studies, race and gender in popular culture and media, intergroup relations.

Thesis title : African American Adolescent Girls and Positive Body Image: Reference Groups Make a Difference.
Thesis title : "The Politics of African American female beauty in Ebony Magazine: the 1960's and 1970's."

Monika Gosin is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California , San Diego (UCSD). Her current research focuses on the intersections of immigration, blackness, and Latinidad in the lives and media representations of Afro Cubans in the U.S. Gosin is also a Diversity Trainer and provides workshops and consulting on issues of diversity for university organizations. She has previously worked in association with researchers from Arizona State University 's (ASU) department of Social Work and The Pennsylvania State University department of Communication to create Keepin' it REAL, a drug prevention curriculum for multi-ethnic youth, as part of a research project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

Michelle R. Gutiérrez - m2gutier@weber.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 Sun0Hee Park; Natalia M. Molina; George Mariscal

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

Kyung Hee Ha - (Entering Fall 2008)

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

Mentor: Yen Espiritu

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

M.A. Thesis: The Promise of an Education: Asian Americans in Ethnic Studies

Asian Americans occupy a unique position at the university in the 21 st century. While they are highly represented on university campuses, few research studies have addressed their experiences beyond the model minority stereotype. The model minority myth says that Asian Americans are passive and hard working; and overachieving Asian American students pursue engineering, math, and science as their college major. In my research, I examine the experiences of fourteen Asian American students who decide to take an alternate route in higher education by pursuing ethnic studies. I chose to interview undergraduates pursuing ethnic studies as their major/minor at a highly ranked California public institution. 

The paper examines the notion of the passive Asian American and engages in a discussion of a critical pedagogy of learning for Asian American students. Based on interview data from mainly second generation Asian Americans, students discussed their educational experiences from K-12, participation in extracurricular activities, struggles in school, and ideas about activism. Asian American students state that choosing to pursue ethnic studies validates their experiences as Asian Americans; creates a social consciousness of the experiences of oppressed communities; and empowers students to make social change. As a reaction against racism, students pursued ethnic studies to rectify the erasure of their own histories in the educational system. Since the inception of ethnic studies at San Francisco State College (1969), Asian American students today continue to discuss their education as intricately linked to their perceptions of activism, utilizing their college education to educate peers, friends, and family.

Thesis Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Lisa Park, David Pellow

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)
Mentors: Lisa Park; Pal Ahluwalia
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.

• Voicing Indigeneity Blogspot

Kit Myers - kmyers@ucsd.edu

B.A., Ethnic Studies and Journalism, University of Oregon (2006)
Mentor:  Natalia Molina, Pal Ahluwalia
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 (entering Fall 2008)

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

Areas of Interest: 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.

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)

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 - sruiz@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.

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

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

M.A.: Japan Women’s University, American Studies
B.A.: Japan Women’s University, English Literature/ American Studies
Fulbright Recipient

Mentor: David Pellow

As the first step in a larger research project, my master thesis attempts to examine conventional racial and gender stereotypes surrounding the marriage of Japanese women to American servicemen after WWII and analyze their impact on the formation of self-identity.

The American and Japanese previous studies have approached this subject from greatly different perspectives. Most Japanese scholars regard these Japanese women as war victims, or as a miserable result of the defeat of Japan, and have focused on the success of their marriages in the U.S. or their divorce rate. On the other hand, American researchers tend to deal with these women as a sort of attractive spoils of war. Thus, one can argue that previous works try to determine the extent to which these exotic women could assimilate into American society. Most American works celebrate Japanese war brides and claim that they were relatively assimilated smoothly into mainstream American society, just as popular novels and movies portray them in the 1950s. Previous works also fail to address these women’s actual experiences by only interpreting the decisions and actions taken by them. It is necessary to emphasize the fact that the women themselves chose to marry GIs and strived to acculturate themselves to their new social environment. I focus on their experiences by analyzing my interviews with them, and suggest their historical and social meanings.

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

My thesis examines the Hmong Veterans' Naturalization Act of 1997 to critically interrogate United States secrets, war, and empire. In doing so, it explores the questions: How does the dominant discourse of the recognition process create an illusion about the secret war that hides the Hmong's crucial role and the work of US empire in it? How is the hiding of secrets revealing of how the nation-state and citizenship work? What does the juxtaposition of the refugee and soldier figures reveal about these secrets, war, and illuminate the relational, transnational processes of US state power?

Thus, I formulate the refugee soldier figure to strategically conjoin the Hmong soldier figure constructed within an international context and the Hmong refugee figure situated within the US national borders, whose nexus foregrounds US imperialism in the context of the secret war. The refugee soldier figure as an analytical tool ruptures the meta-narrative of the citizen-soldier and its relationship to the nation-state because the state's ideological work to assimilate the refugee soldier makes contingent its power. In other words, the citizen-soldier is defined as belonging to the nation, both protector of and protected by it, but the refugee soldier exposes that this belonging is always already violent. The refugee soldier figure is also revealing of the work to deny and disavow US empire and brings to the fore secrets as political and intrinsic to the work of state power.
This project proposes to do two things in its analysis of the bill's subcommittee hearing. First, it pays close attention to the erasure of the secret war from analyses of US empire and the Hmong's critical role in it. The absence of Hmong critical perspectives and the paradox of the secret war necessitate an interrogation of what their foreclosure, through legislative recognition, reveals about the nation-state and its flexible , violent borders of belonging. Secondly, it investigates how the refugee soldier figure gets at the tenuousness of US citizenship. In this context, I argue that it reveals the transnational context of citizenship formation and nation-making that is based on difference.

(The idea of violent belongings is from Amy Kaplan, Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003 , American Quarterly 56:1 (March 2004): 1-18.)

Thesis Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Ross H. Frank, Takashi Fujitani (History)

Related Interests: critical Hmong studies, refugee studies, race & gender, transnationalism, Asian American studies.

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

• Sandra Angeleri (2006)
• Natchee Blu Barnd (2008)
• Faye Caronan (2007)
• Lisa Cacho (2002)
• Ofelia Cuevas (2008)
• Lilia Fernández (2005)
• May Chuan Fu (2005)
• Julie Hua (2006)
• Ralina Landwehr Joseph (2005)
• Denise Khor (2008)
• Ashley Lucas (2006)
• John Márquez (2004)
• Jesse Mills (2008)
• Cecilia Rivas (2007)
• Paula Seniors (2003)
• Ruby Tapia (2002)
• Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr. (2006)
• Michael Truong (2004)
• Thuy Vo Dang (2008)
• Theo Verinakis (2008)