Advancing Justice: Responses to Anti-Asian Racism in the U.S.

Panelists:

Han Lu, Senior Policy Analyst, National Employment Law Project

christina ong, PhD Student, Department of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh

Elena Shih, Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University

Moderator: Vivian Shaw, College Fellow, Department of Sociology, Harvard University; Co-Principal Investigator, AAPI COVID-19 Project

Sponsored by Harvard University Asia Center; Co-sponsored by the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights​, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Korea Institute, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.

Han Lu's work at the National Employment Law Project focuses on how inequalities of nationhood, carceral punishment, and the workplace shape one another. Prior to his work at NELP, Han was a line defender at the Orleans Public Defenders. He is a first-generation college graduate. Prior to law school, Han worked as a defense investigator for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, the juvenile public defender in his hometown of New Orleans.

christina ong is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh studying the development of Asian America in the 1960s-1980s through an in-depth case study of New York City’s the Basement Workshop. She also serves as the Project Manager and Qualitative Committee Co-Lead for the AAPI COVID-19 Project, a multidisciplinary mixed-methods study on how COVID-19 is impacting AAPI lives in the United States. Her research interests span topics related to diaspora, racial justice, and transnational feminisms.

Vivian Shaw is a College Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and the Lead Researcher (co-PI) for the AAPI COVID-19 Project, a multi-method investigation into the impacts of the pandemic on the lives of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin with graduate portfolios in Asian American Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies. From 2018-2019, Vivian was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Center for International Relations’ Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, also at Harvard.

Elena Shih is the Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster through Brown's Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Shih's book project, "Manufacturing Freedom: Trafficking Rescue, Rehabilitation, and the Slave Free Good" (under contract with University of California Press), is a global ethnography of the transnational social movement to combat human trafficking in China, Thailand, and the United States. Shih is an outreach organizer with Red Canary Song, a grassroots coalition of massage workers, sex workers, and allies in New York City.

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