Simi Kang

Background

About Simi Kang

I am an Asian Americanist whose work connects critical refugee studies and environmental racism using feminist ethnography. In August 2019, I received my doctorate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota and am currently a Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at Carnegie Mellon University. I believe that social engagement is imperative to doing good academic work, and use my skills as an artist, community activist, and writer to not only ask questions, but to contribute to effecting social change alongside people I deeply respect and admire, including Asian American activists in Minnesota, food justice advocates and growers in New Orleans, and artists and writers across the United States. As a feminist ethnographer, I work with Vietnamese/American fisherfolk in Southeast Louisiana to consider what federal and state agencies privilege and exclude in local land, marsh, and water restoration projects. By acknowledging that the Gulf Coast has long been a national environmental sacrifice zone, I ask how colonialism's ongoing impacts on U.S. notions of resource management, environmentalism, sovereignty, and 'Americanness' show up in these projects. I then explore the attendant call for coastal peoples to be 'resilient' in the face of ever-changing decisions made for, rather than with, them. My work brings race and place into conversation with U.S. immigration law, land and water rights, national and transnational policy, disaster, gender, labor, and discourses on food and production. I specialize in: critical feminist praxis and pedagogy; feminist ethnography; Vietnamese American studies; South Louisiana; critical ethnic studies; land and water rights; transnationalism; disaster studies; sovereignty and nationalism; the politics of food; critical Southeast Asian American refugee studies; labor and gender; socio-economic inequality; comparative race and ethnicity; the U.S. and Southeast Asia. I have work forthcoming in 'Environment & Society' and in an edited volume published by Ananya Dance Theatre. My writing has been previously published in 'The Asian American Literary Review,''Open Rivers: Rethinking the Mississippi,''Gravy Quarterly,''Unmargin,''Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged,''The Migrationist,' and 'Kartika Review.'