Bringing together grassroots organizers and scholar-activists, Contemporary Asian American Activism presents lived experiences of the fight for transformative justice and offers lessons to ensure the longevity and sustainability of organizing. In the face of imperialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and more, the contributors celebrate victories and assess failures, reflect on the trials of activist life, critically examine long-term movement building, and inspire continued mobilization for coming generations.

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Speakers:

Diane C. Fujino is a Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is author or co-editor of several books on Asian American or Black activism, including Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (with Haymarket Books); Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation; Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake; and Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama. She works with the UCLA Asian American Studies digital textbook project, the UCSB ÉXITO ethnic studies teacher training project, Cooperation Santa Barbara, and the Fund for Santa Barbara.

Javaid Tariq is a cofounder and senior staff member of New York Taxi Workers Alliance and treasurer of the National Taxi Workers’ Alliance. He was born in Pakpattan, in Punjab, Pakistan. As a college student, he was active in the student movement against the military dictatorship. He migrated to Germany and later to the United States in 1990. Over the years he has organized numerous successful strikes, campaigns, and actions to promote economic and social justice for taxi drivers, a workforce that is 94 percent immigrant and primarily people of color.

Alex T. Tom is the Executive Director of the Center For Empowered Politics, a new project that trains and develops new leaders of color and grows movement building infrastructure at the intersection of racial justice, organizing and power building. He is the former Executive Director of the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco and co-founder of Seeding Change. In 2019, Alex received the Open Society Foundation Racial Justice Fellowship to develop a toolkit to counter the rise of the new Chinese American Right Wing in the US.

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez is a scholar-activist who has organized around issues impacting the Asian American community for nearly 30 years. Most recently, she helped to build the Asian American Liberation Network in the greater Sacramento region. Rodriguez also teaches in and publishes on Asian American Studies as a faculty member of the Asian American Studies Department at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies.