Chancellor’s Arts Initiative Awards Grant to Umemoto

/0 Comments/in /by

Urban Planning Professor Karen Umemoto has been named a recipient of the 2021 Chancellor’s Arts Initiative, a program to advance arts-related research that is timely, relevant and original and that increases public awareness of the arts at UCLA. Umemoto, director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, is one of 12 faculty members to receive a grant under the $150,000 program sponsored by the Chancellor’s Council on the Arts and the Office for Research and Creative Activities. Priority was given to projects that contribute to UCLA’s larger commitments to sustainability, anti-racism, equity, diversity and inclusion. Amid a rise in anti-Asian violence in America, the Asian American Studies Center in collaboration with the Asia Pacific Center will spearhead a multimedia and multiperforming arts event commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871, which involved the lynching of 19 Chinese immigrants. In addition to spoken narrative based on an original script, the project will feature body movement artists and a soundscape that draws from culturally diverse acoustic instruments and computer-generated sounds. This community engagement piece will include a pre-performance workshop and a post-event reception with speakers, performers and invited guests sharing historical accounts of racist violence against Asians in Los Angeles and linking the experiences of the past to the present. The Chancellor’s Council on the Arts also announced the launch of GO ARTS UCLA, an online platform that brings together the full array of UCLA arts and humanities events and research in one central location, underscoring the role of the arts at the university and within Los Angeles’ cultural ecosystem.

 

Umemoto on Coalitions Emerging From Firestorm of Racism

/0 Comments/in /by

Urban Planning Professor Karen Umemoto spoke to the Los Angeles Times and the podcast Then & Now about the dramatic rise in attacks on Asian Americans. Umemoto called the violence a “shadow epidemic,” stoked by former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak. “Trump’s role in exacerbating and igniting this firestorm can’t be denied,” she told the L.A. Times. But she also pointed to a new era of coalition-building among communities of color long targeted by a culture steeped in white supremacy. “One of Trump’s legacies is sparking more activism and more acts of solidarity across many groups who became victim of many of his policies and rhetoric,” she told the podcast, produced by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. To tackle structural racism at its roots, Umemoto called for educating schoolchildren about the history and contributions of Asian Americans so that they are no longer considered the “perpetual foreigner.”

Read the Los Angeles Times article
Listen to the Then & Now podcast

Umemoto’s Team Addresses Language Barrier in Vaccine Access

/0 Comments/in /by

Urban Planning Professor Karen Umemoto spoke to KCRW about the website Translate COVID, which provides information about COVID-19 in over 60 languages. Launched in May 2020, the site has been updated over the past few months with vital information about vaccination rules and eligibility. “We noticed that there was a lot of translated material beginning to come out from the CDC and local health departments across the country, but there was no central or easy-to-use site that consolidated all of that information,” Umemoto explained. “There’s so much misinformation on social media and especially within immigrant networks.” Umemoto, director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, worked with the Fielding School of Public Health to aggregate information from vetted sources and organized it on the website. “More recently, we noticed that there was a lot of misinformation about the vaccines that would likely cause some vaccine resistance, so we put together an FAQ that will soon be in 20 languages,” she said.

Listen to the podcast

Umemoto on Preserving Asian American History

/0 Comments/in /by

Karen Umemoto, urban planning professor and director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, was featured in an NBC News article about the role of ethnic studies programs in preserving Asian American history. Many of the activists who led the Asian American movement in the 1960s for representation in politics, scholarship and culture are now passing away. The loss has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re at an important point in history where we have to record their stories,” Umemoto said. “There are so many rich life lessons that we can learn from their involvement in movements for social change.” It has been more than 50 years since the first Asian American studies curricula were established in California colleges, but only a handful of post-secondary institutions offer degrees in the field. Even within those programs, the story of the Asian American civil rights movement and the people who built it is often given short shrift, Umemoto said.

Read the article

Urban Planning Faculty Spearhead Mass Incarceration Archive Project

/0 Comments/in , /by

Urban Planning Professors Kelly Lytle Hernández and Karen Umemoto as well as incoming Urban Planning Assistant Professor Marques Vestal are collaborating on a new initiative to create an archive on policing and mass incarceration in Los Angeles. The project, called “Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration,” aims to collect, digitize and preserve a sustainable archive of data, testimonies, artifacts and police files for the next generation of research on racial and social justice. “The new platform will catapult our centers into the digital future in knowledge-sharing and knowledge production,” said Umemoto, director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. The archive will build off the work of the UCLA-based Million Dollar Hoods research project, a community-driven initiative that began in 2016 to quantify the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. Scholars from UCLA ethnic studies centers and the Million Dollar Hoods project will train UCLA students to work with the digital archives. “This new collaboration between Million Dollar Hoods and UCLA’s ethnic studies centers will preserve the documentary evidence of mass incarceration and its impact on people’s lives in Los Angeles while building a new digital bedrock for racial justice scholars and scholarship at UCLA,” said Lytle Hernández, director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. The project will encompass research across several communities of color, highlighting ways in which they are disproportionately affected by mass incarceration. “Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration” is made possible by funding from a three-year, $3.65 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Umemoto Remembers Mentor Lane Hirabayashi

/0 Comments/in /by

A Rafu Shimpo obituary of renowned scholar and author Lane Ryo Hirabayashi included a tribute from Urban Planning Professor Karen Umemoto. Hirabayashi, professor emeritus of Asian American Studies at UCLA, died Aug. 8 at age 67. “We will sorely miss Lane Hirabayashi, a beloved teacher, mentor and friend,” said Umemoto, director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center. “He left us a priceless gift in his lifetime of scholarly research and writings on Japanese American history, and World War II incarceration history in particular.” Hirabayashi authored over 30 scholarly articles, taught courses on the Japanese American experience and Asian American studies, and worked with many community-based organizations. “His work advanced the field of Japanese American studies and also community-driven public history,” Umemoto said. “We are humbled by his selfless contributions to the community as well as to the generations of students and colleagues who were transformed by his wisdom and generosity.”

Read the obituary

Spotlight on the ‘Next Disaster Under COVID-19’

/0 Comments/in , , /by

KABC7 and FOX11 covered a forum featuring several UCLA Luskin scholars who weighed in on the impending threat of eviction and homelessness facing many Angelenos. Calling the tenants rights crisis “The Next Disaster Under COVID-19,” the forum brought together Paul Ong of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, Ananya Roy of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Gary Blasi of UCLA Law and moderator Karen Umemoto of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, along with several housing justice advocates. The news segment focused on the latest UCLA Luskin research identifying the region’s most vulnerable neighborhoods and outlining steps public officials can take to protect Angelenos at risk of losing their homes. Recommended policies include rent subsidies and the conversion of hotel and motel rooms, which have remained vacant during the pandemic, into housing. The research has also been shared by the Daily Journal, World Journal, LAist and NextCity, among other outlets.

View the KABC7 report
View the FOX11 report

 

The Next Disaster under COVID-19: Mass Evictions and Homelessness

/0 Comments/in , , /by

With the eviction moratorium set to be lifted on September 30, 2020, about 365,000 renter households in Los Angeles County are in imminent danger of eviction and homelessness according to a recent study from the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Please join us for a virtual public forum with housing justice researchers and community organizers to discuss the tenants’ rights crisis and what can be done to mitigate the damage to Angelenos through enforceable rights and robust protections.

The event will feature research findings from these 3 reports:

UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles

This report projects a surge in evictions and homelessness that will follow the lifting of COVID-19 emergency orders.

Hotel California: Housing the Crisis

This report lays out a comprehensive framework for the conversion of hospitality properties into housing through the large-scale public acquisition of tourist hotels and motels.

Economic Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis in Los Angeles: Identifying Renter-Vulnerable Neighborhoods

This study provides information to public agencies and community organizations to help them better identify neighborhoods with a high concentration of vulnerable renters, to understand the neighborhoods’ socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, and to design outreach programs that address the specific challenges in each place.

Speakers:

Gary Blasi, UCLA Law School

Ananya Roy, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality & Democracy

Paul Ong, UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge

Jane Nguyen, Ktown for All

Leonardo Vilchis & Elizabeth Blaney, Union de Vecinos

Jason Li & Alejandro Cortez, Chinatown Community for Equitable Development

Moderator: Karen Umemoto, UCLA Asian American Studies Center

Sponsored by:

UCLA Asian American Studies Center

UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge

Ktown for All

Union de Vecinos

Chinatown Community for Equitable Development

UCLA Asian American Studies Department

Umemoto on Translating COVID-19 Information

/0 Comments/in /by

In an Ed Scoop article, Karen Umemoto, urban planning professor and director of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, discussed the importance of translating public health information and recommendations into several languages. UCLA has launched a website with health and safety recommendations related to the COVID-19 pandemic translated into more than 40 languages. The website will help inform the many communities that lack access to official news, public health information and safety recommendations in a language other than English, Umemoto said. According to U.S. Census data, more than 50% of people in the Greater Los Angeles area do not speak English at home. “Los Angeles is home to a critical mass of many non-English-speaking communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander,” Umemoto said. During a pandemic, households representing racial minorities often face a disproportionate burden of illness and death.

Read the article

Umemoto’s ‘Mountain Movers’ Wins Bronze Book Award

/0 Comments/in /by

“Mountain Movers: Student Activism & the Emergence of Asian American Studies,” a book co-edited by Urban Planning Professor Karen Umemoto, was awarded a bronze medal in the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards for “Best Regional Nonfiction” in the West-Pacific region. Umemoto was one of six editors on the team that put together “Mountain Movers,” which chronicles the legacy of student activism at UCLA, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State. Published last year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Asian American Studies programs that were established on all three campuses in 1969, the book profiles students who mobilized peers and community members to further the study of Asian American communities on their campuses. The “IPPY” Awards, launched in 1996 by Jenkins Group and IndependentPublisher.com, are designed to increase recognition of deserving but often unsung titles by independent authors and publishers. Established as the first awards program open exclusively to independent, university and self-published titles, over 5,500 “IPPYs” have been awarded in the last 24 years to authors and publishers around the world, recognizing excellence in a broad range of styles and subjects.