This study investigates the practices that radical Asian American social workers undertake in response to the dilemmas that arise between their political beliefs and the social work profession. Based on interviews with ten activist social workers selected through snowball and criterion sampling, this project asks: How are radical Asian American social workers shaping their practice based on a reimagination of the field? This study responds to the paucity of social work literature on Asian American practitioners, especially as related to the social work profession’s heightened contradictions in the time of neoliberalism. It remains clear that there is much for social work to learn from Asian Americans who have more radical agendas for change. Heeding Robert Mullaly and Eric Keating’s (1991) call that “radical social workers work both inside and outside the welfare state” (p. 69), I argue that radical Asian American social work encompasses three modes of practice: infrapolitics and insurgency, healing work as political practice, and political and community organizing. Within the welfare state, interviewees engage in subversive practices, or infrapolitics and insurgency, to help protect and empower themselves and the people with whom they work. Interviewees also take part in healing work as political practice by invoking family history and radical imaginations in a typically ahistorical space. Their organizing work takes place outside traditional service organizations and involves organizing social work colleagues as well as addressing social and political forces that affect their communities’ lives. Ultimately, the work of radical Asian American social workers lead us to identify the ways white supremacy have shaped the contemporary field’s lens and refuse to comply with practices we know harm communities our own or otherwise. Instead, we will offer critiques of the current structures and begin building alternate modes of practice to empower and survive, pending revolution.

Heralded as the model multicultural global city of the future in the 1980s, Los Angeles was suddenly seen as the hotbed of civil unrest in 1992. This shift in image, whether accurate or not, has prompted many to wonder what has taken place in Los Angeles over the past twenty years in regards to the problem of racial conflict. Hate crime reports provide one source of data that is regularly collected over time and is also location specific. Though these data are problematic, hate incidents are an extremely useful measure as part of a fuller study of race relations. This paper provides a profile of the problem of hate crime in Los Angeles County using hate crime data collected between 1994 and 1997. Geographic information systems (GIS) technology is used to identify clusters. We then analyze clusters to develop a profile of race-bias hate crimes for the county. We conclude with a discussion of the use of hate crime data in the study of racial conflict and outline directions for future research.

Gaman is a value associated with the endurance of individuals of Japanese descent unjustly incarcerated by the U.S. War Relocation Authority during World War II; this sentiment rings familiar in the COVID-19 pandemic, throughout which the public has been urged to remain resilient despite social determinants of health-related issues disproportionately impacting cultural communities. This study focuses on the culturally tailored programs and services of three Little Tokyo-based organizations, with five “Critical Factors” that enabled effective organizing during the COVID-19 pandemic identified through interviews with twelve key staff members: Trust, Financial Capacity, Physical Space, Organizational Capacity, and Legacy Investment. These findings shed light on the strengths of and challenges faced by Little Tokyo community organizers, emphasize the unique role of community-centered organizations in addressing health needs, and inform a conceptual model for Community-Centered Health—a model that advocates for building systems of care rooted in trusting relationships and predicated upon gratitude.

Since WWII Okinawa Island has remained one of the densest global outposts of US militarism. Over seventy-percent of all US military land throughout Japan is concentrated in Okinawa Prefecture – the formerly independent Ryukyu Kingdom – on less than one-percent of the country’s land base. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of Indigenous repossession that occurs when militarized land is reclaimed by those from whom it was dispossessed. Specifically, I ask: What has been the effect of military base return on Okinawans’ relationships with land and strategies of resistance under the US and Japanese governments’ post-1995 regime of base realignment? Using a mixed-methods embedded case study methodology and eighteen months of fieldwork including discourse analysis, interviews and social movement participation I present three substantive sections. My historical entry-point is an archival study of militarist dispossession in the first decade of US military occupation following the Battle of Okinawa. Then, I offer two contemporary embedded cases. The first of these examines the return of the US Army’s Awase Meadows Golf Club in Kitanakagusuku Village and its subsequent redevelopment into what at the time was Okinawa’s largest Western-styled shopping mall. The second case study examines the sit-in against the construction of a new “replacement facility” in the northern village of Henoko, which was made a necessary condition for the yet unrealized return of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan City under the US-Japan Special Action Committee on Okinawa’s Final Report. I argue that the return of military land produces no necessary reversal of the territorial alienation and uneven exposure to violence that Okinawans have experienced over seventy-eight years of military occupation. Instead, novel forms of occupation and continuities of colonial violence emerge even in periods of purported demilitarization. Okinawans participate flexibly in this regime of return, negotiating mainstream planning processes and participating in protest to realize myriad benefits from economic empowerment to cultural reconstruction in the wake of Japanese and American colonialisms. Findings from this dissertation emphasize the necessity of understanding the procedural dynamics of military land reform in conjunction with the larger political frame of reterritorialization in which resurgent Indigenous peoples are engaged.