Please join the UCI Law Korea Law Center for a discussion with esteemed panelists, Professors Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Claire Jean Kim, and Sameer Ashar. Our panel will address how Asian Americans can take moments of suffering as opportunities to better understand the conflicts affecting our communities, and how collaboration with the African American community and other communities of color can provide for transformative change, especially in times of increasing hate crimes.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and also directs the  UCI Humanities Center. She received her PhD in U.S. History from Stanford University and previously taught for seventeen years at Ohio State University. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity (UC  Press, 2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell University Press, 2013). Her current book project, a collaboration with political scientist Gwendolyn Mink, explores the political career of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. congressional representative and the co-sponsor of Title IX. She also is working on a book that focuses on Asian American and Pacific Islander Women who attended the 1977 National Women’s Conference.

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and a Faculty Affiliate of Gender & Sexuality Studies and Queer Studies at the University of California, Irvine. During her time at UCI, she has received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research through her contributions in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and Division of Undergraduate Education. Willoughby-Herard works on comparative racialization in the South African and North American contexts, Black political thought, and African feminisms.  In her recent book, Waste of a White Skin: Carnegie and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (UC Press, 2015), she uses black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition, to explore the effects of politics of white poverty on black people’s lives, work, and political resistance. In particular, this groundbreaking book examines the ways in which the philanthropic institution of the Carnegie Foundation contributed to the constitution of apartheid as a process of knowledge production in South Africa.

Claire Jean Kim is a Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000) is the recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Ralph Bunche Award for the Best Book on Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism and a Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Her second book, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press, 2015), is the also the recipient of a Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Dr. Kim has written numerous journal articles, book chapters, and essays, and she is co-editor of a special issue of American Quarterly entitled Species/Race/Sex (2013). She is the recipient of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Sameer Ashar is the Associate Dean for Equity Initiatives and a Clinical Professor of Law and UCI School of Law. Professor Ashar has worked with students to defend immigrants in deportation proceedings and low-wage workers in litigation against exploitative employers in clinics at five law schools. He has also worked with students on numerous policy advocacy and community education projects in collaboration with immigrant and labor organizations in California, New York, and Maryland. Professor Ashar writes about law, lawyering, and social movements across multiple subject areas, including labor law, immigration law, and the legal profession. The focus of his scholarship is on how law and lawyering both inhibits and enables collective action against racial and economic subordination. ProfessoAshar has published most recently in Clinical Law Review, Law & Contemporary Problems, Fordham Law Review, Daedalus, and UCLA Law Review and is the inaugural recipient of the Stephen Ellmann Memorial Clinical Scholarship Award, given by the AALS Section on Clinical Education.