Principal Investigators Team
Jean Beaman
Jean Beaman is Associate Professor of Sociology, with affiliations with Political Science, Feminist Studies, Global Studies, and the Center for Black Studies Research, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, she was faculty at Purdue University and held visiting fellowships at Duke University and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state-sponsored violence in both France and the United States. She is the author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her current book project is on suspect citizenship and belonging, anti-racist mobilization, and activism against police violence in France. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. She is also an Editor of H-Net Black Europe, an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques.
France Winddance Twine
France Winddance Twine is Black and Native American (Muscogee Creek Nation) Professor of Sociology and a documentary filmmaker with an affiliation in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Twine is a critical race theorist, feminist ethnographer, and visual sociologist. She has conducted research on racial/class/gender inequalities on both sides of the Atlantic and in both the northern and southern hemispheres (Brazil, Ecuador, UK, and United States). Her research which is interdisciplinary, intersectional, and international employs visual methods such as photo-elicitation interviews and racial consciousness biographies. Twine is the 2020 recipient of the Distinguished Career Award from the Race, Gender, and Class section of the American Sociological Association. Twine is the author and editor of eleven books and 75 articles, essays, and book chapters. Her first documentary titled Just Black? (New York, Filmmakers Library), was co-produced while Twine was a graduate student at UC-Berkeley, received two awards. Her recent selected publications include: Geek Girls: Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley (NYU Press, 2022), Geographies of Privilege (2015, second edition), Outsourcing the Womb (2013), and A White Side of Black Britain: interracial intimacy and racial literacy (2010). Twine’s current research is a collaboration on the intersections of race and class in queer family formation with Marcin Smietana at Cambridge University.
John S.W. Park
John S.W. Park is Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is a legal scholar who has specialized in United States immigration history, including the history of citizenship and of race-based exclusions in American public law. He has conducted archival research for his four scholarly monographs on immigration law and policy, published with NYU Press, Routledge, Temple University Press, and Polity Press. He also reviews scholarly monographs for leading university presses, as well as manuscripts for the Law and Society Review, Law and History Review, and the Journal for Asian American Studies. He is currently working on a history of the American presence in South Korea, as well as the migration of Koreans to the United States since 1903. He has been a visiting faculty member in the Yonsei International Summer School since 2016.
Kim Yasuda
Kim Yasuda is an artist and professor of Public Practice in the Department of Art at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her work investigates the role of art, artists, and educational institutions in community development and civic life. Yasuda’s past exhibition work has been presented at museums and alternative spaces in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art and Art in General, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art@ Champion, CT; Massachusetts Institute of Technology List Visual Arts Center, Boston; Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Camerawork Gallery, East London. She has been the recipient of individual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, US/Japan Foundation, Howard Foundation, Art Matters, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation. Yasuda’s previous commissioned public projects include station designs for the Broad Street Corridor transit system in Providence, Rhode Island, the Green Line Vermont Metrorail, and Union Station Gateway Center for the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Los Angeles. Her permanent commemorative works are part of the public art collections for the cities of St. Louis, San Jose, and Hollywood, designed to preserve the cultural legacies and local histories of these communities. Yasuda’s current research intersects her university teaching with her public art practice, shaping pedagogical experiments that explore the intersection between institutional knowledge production and creative practice. Yasuda and her students have undertaken numerous projects together, working on temporary public interventions and permanent urban renewal projects in the student community of Isla Vista. These open-access, collaborative learning environments maintain a separate academic calendar and curricula to conduct year-round, off-site, and multi-disciplinary projects.
Lisa Parks
Lisa Parks is Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures (GMTaC) Lab at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on three areas: media globalization and satellite technologies; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization, and surveillance. Some of her past work has analyzed state and NGO uses of satellite images and digital interfaces to track displaced persons in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. Parks is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018) and Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005). She is co-editor of Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke UP, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003). A 2018 recipient of the MacArthur fellowship, Parks’ work explores how a greater understanding of media systems can assist citizens, scholars, and policymakers in the US and abroad to advance campaigns for technological inclusion, creative expression, and social and environmental justice. Before returning to UCSB, Parks was a Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.
Researchers
Yang-Sook Kim,
Postdoctoral Researcher
Yang-Sook Kim received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Toronto in November 2020 with her dissertation entitled Competing Subjectivities: A Comparative Study of Low-Paid Care Workers in Greater Seoul and the Los Angeles Koreatown. Her scholarship centers on how subordinated people make sense of, navigate and resist the deepening inequalities in the context of neoliberal globalization. Informed by feminist scholarship on the reproductive labor, international migration and race/ethnicity, her dissertation project examines how unequally-positioned groups of marginalized women workers navigate the intensifying precarity with a comparative case study of care sectors in South Korea and the United States. A part of the project, which was published in Critical Sociology in 2018, analyzes how South Korea-born and Korean-Chinese migrant workers deploy gender and ethnicity, or, Koreanness, in their labor market strategies that center on what she calls “boundary marking” processes along the ethnic line. Contrasting state-certified South Korea-born workers’ narratives of their self-worth as professional eldercare specialists to informal Korean-Chinese workers’ whole-hearted care narratives, she argues that the hierarchies between similar yet unequally positioned groups of marginalized women workers are perpetuated through the micro-politics of care that is shaped by the nexus of migration and welfare regimes. Another piece from her dissertation was published in Political Power and Social Theory in 2018. Drawing on an extensive case study of the National House Manager Cooperative, a domestic workers’ cooperative organized by the Korean Women Workers’ Association, she and the co-author Jennifer Jihye Chun examine the real and thorny constraints that the KWWA faced in organizing marginalized women workers. Eschewing the overly simple depiction of the “dangerous liaison” between feminism and neoliberalism in previous scholarship, they call for the need to evaluate critically the political horizons of grassroots feminist politics.
Adam Burston,
Graduate Student Researcher
Adam Burston is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Dept. with an emphasis in Information, Technology, and Society. His work lies at the intersection of race, gender, and social movement studies. His dissertation research focuses on the strategies that right-wing activists employ to form multi-racial coalitions, mobilize in digital and physical spaces, and enact social change. Adam. Previously, Adam was a research associate with Carnegie Mellon’s Dept. of Engineering and Public Policy, a volunteer crisis counselor with Pittsburgh Action Against Rape, and a prison-based educator with the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program. He is a proud alum of Goucher College ‘16.
Samantha Harris,
Graduate Student Researcher
Samantha (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Education studying language and literacy education. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Maryland College Park and an M.A. in TESOL from Georgetown University. She taught English as a Second Language at Baltimore/Washington area community colleges for three years before coming to UCSB. Her research focuses on the intersections of language, race, and education with a specific focus on heritage language learners and students classified as English Learners.