REI Colloquium: Cartographies of Housing Justice and Abolitionist Futures

This is the second in the 2024-2025 academic year's series of events examining race, ethnicity, and immigration. Dr. Diane Wong will present "Cartographies of Housing Justice and Abolitionist Futures, Chinatown Style"

From campaigns to stop the construction of the borough based jails to tenants organizing rent strikes against predatory landlords, this talk will explore the connections between gentrification, carcerality, and abolition. Drawing from her community collaborations in New York’s Chinatown, Dr. Diane Wong focuses on how Asian American women, queer, and non-binary youth are engaging in abolitionist organizing to build a more inclusive and intergenerational movement for housing justice. What insurgent practices already exist within our communities that center collective needs and visions for wholeness? What would a commitment to transformative housing justice require from movement and university-based scholars? Her work contributes to an emergent line of feminist inquiry that attends to the everyday harms of racial capitalism and the liberatory possibilities that emerge from within the interstices that might speak to the speculative—or what is yet to come.

Diane Wong is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark and an affiliate faculty of Global Urban Studies, American Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies. Her interests include Asian American politics, critical urban studies, racial capitalism, cultural and media studies, and community rooted research. Her forthcoming book, You Can’t Evict A Movement: Intergenerational Activism and Housing Justice in New York City, combines ethnography, participatory mapping, community archives, augmented reality, and oral history interviews to examine intergenerational resistance to dispossession in Manhattan Chinatown. Her other book, Asian America Rising, presents a series of contemporary case studies that represent the diversity of Asian American political activism, mutual aid, community building, and issue-based organizing. She is co-editor of a double special issue on “Asian American Abolition Feminisms,” for Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Her research has been generously funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, Russell Sage Foundation, Institute for Citizens and Scholars, National Science Foundation, New York Humanities, Asian Women Giving Circle, and more. Her writing has been published in PS: Political Science and Politics, Amerasia Journal, Urban Affairs Review, Politics, Groups and Identities, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Gateways, and in a variety of public media outlets, anthologies, and exhibitions. As an multimedia artist, Diane recently curated the exhibits “Archives as Memorial” for the Storefront for Ideas and “De-Gentrification Archives” for Pace University Art Galleries in New York City.

This is an accessible event. If you are a disabled person and need reasonable accommodations to participate they will be provided. For more information, and to make a request, please contact Ezra Bristow at [email protected]

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Harris Room - Institute of Governmental Studies, 119 Philosophy Hall, Berkeley, United States