- 2022 Annual Meeting Updates
- Spotlight on Annual Meeting Location: Environmental Racism and How Immigrant Women Refuse Death in LA
- Encourage Your Students to Apply for Honors Program
- Invitation to Participate: Strategies for Recruiting Students; Documenting Publicly Engaged Projects
- Apply to be a TRAILS Editorial Board Member
2022 Annual Meeting Updates
The ASA 117th Annual Meeting is scheduled to be held August 5-9, 2022, in Los Angeles, CA. The program focuses on 2022 ASA President Cecilia Menjívar’s theme “Bureaucracies of Displacement.” Here are some updates:
Annual Meeting Portal Open for Submissions. The 2022 Annual Meeting portal is open for submissions. The deadline to submit is February 9, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. There are several different avenues to submit your paper/extended abstract. Review the Call for Submissions page for details.
In addition to paper submissions, we are also accepting proposals for courses, workshops, preconferences, the Sociology in Practice Settings Symposium, and the Teaching and Learning Symposium.
ASA is carefully monitoring recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others regarding the COVID-19 situation as we make plans to host the Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. At present, we are planning for an in-person event, but we may revise plans for the health and well-being of our community. Annual Meeting attendees will be required to follow all health and safety protocols mandated at the time of the meeting.
Volunteer to be a Discussant or Presider. ASA is accepting volunteers for Presiders, Table Presiders (roundtable sessions), and Discussants at the Annual Meeting. The volunteer deadline is February 9, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern.
To volunteer, log in to the 2022 Annual Meeting portal with your ASA username and password and click on “Volunteer to be a Discussant or Presider” listed under the Submitter Menu. You may volunteer for up to three roles. Volunteering for a role does not guarantee you will be invited to serve. The session organizer will contact you if you are selected to serve.
Spotlight on Annual Meeting Location: Environmental Racism and How Immigrant Women Refuse Death in LA
By Nadia Y. Kim, Professor of Asian & Asian American Studies and Sociology, Loyola Marymount University
When most people think of LA, they likely conjure images of Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, and the late Kobe Bryant, along with paparazzi shots of Rodeo Drive, Santa Monica, and Malibu. But just beyond the glamorous Hollywood veneer, Los Angeles is a shadowy city of oil, diesel, and premature death. In most global cities like LA, immigrants and other people of color increasingly suffer hyperpollution and alarming rates of asthma and cancer due to their residence near diesel-spewing shipping ports, freeways, and rail yards, and the oil refineries that prop them up.
Importantly, this complex goods movement apparatus exists so that we can buy all the things we do at big box stores and enjoy the unabated flow of goods that hail from China—goods that require oil to be made and shipped. In fact, the massive log jam in this flow, which had many of us wringing our hands over whether our holiday gifts and decor will arrive in time, is due to Americans’ relentless consumption habits. Far-flung factories and cargo ships and local truckers and train operators cannot keep up, especially under a global health crisis.
But there are those who suffer much more than the customers with disposable income who might have had to buy backup holiday gifts. One of the communities I studied in my book, Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford University Press 2021), is Wilmington, a neighborhood in Los Angeles County. Wilmington is home to mostly low-income Mexican immigrants, many of whom are unauthorized. Owing to contamination from goods movement and oil refineries, the more disadvantaged parts of Wilmington suffer the highest cancer risk in Southern California, exceeding 1,000 additional cancer-stricken residents per one million, three orders of magnitude higher than the national Clean Air Act goal of one in one million cancer cases. This information was only discovered after activists demanded it, and the deadly statistic stands despite the fact that in 2014 the South Coast Air Quality Management District had reported significant reductions in cancer risk over the last decade.
To be sure, environmental racism means that middle-class communities with large concentrations of people of color are hyperpolluted as well, such as Carson, Ports of LA and Long Beach, the I-710 (the nation’s most cancerous freeway), a diesel-plumed rail yard, and three massive oil refineries. Filipin@ immigrants and their descendants concentrate in Carson and environmental justice activists there have successfully secured air monitors after a long battle.
Women at the Center of Resistance
As responses from the bottom up show, immigrant-led resistance movements are among the most dynamic in global cities like LA, yet we know little about them. More importantly, we know even less about how women and mothers are at the helm of these movements and how their intersectional social locations profoundly shape the way they view the operation of power and why and how they fight back the way that they do. While women of all racial/ethnic groups have become the backbone and leadership of environmental justice movements upon first noticing their children and neighbors falling ill (Bullard et al. 2007), it is largely women of color, and increasingly immigrants and refugees, who have assumed the mantle today (Bullard, Johnson, Torres 2011; Pellow and Park 2002).
In studying women-led Asian and Latina immigrants’ resistance movements against environmental injustice in LA, home to the worst air quality in the country, I found that the activists redefine racism, classism, and the meaning of citizenship as a cornerstone of their politics. They do so by deeming the neoliberal nativist racist state as a system of physical and emotional violence and neglect, thereby responding with a politics that centers ethics of care for each other’s physical and emotional needs. At the macro level, for instance, previous scholarship has found that institutional officials tend to draw on race/gender/class hierarchies to ridicule the women and their expressed emotionality as a symptom of being “hysterical housewives” and to “trivializ[e]” their street science research as “emotional and unscholarly” (Kirk 1998).
The Injustice of “Just Moving”
A notable example from my fieldwork reflected one of the three common forms of emotional power that the California regulatory officials deployed and normalized in a bid to justify their inaction, pollution policies, and bias toward industry: guilting, often by way of condescension (the other two forms were apathy and disbelief/mockery). The moment occurred at one of the smaller meetings on the expansion of the (cancerous) I-710 that would have meant much more diesel inhaled by the immigrant children and their parents, and the suffering of more safety hazards and more noise and light pollution.
Many of the state officials were tiring of the Latina and Asian residents’ testimonies about their community’s sickness and, ultimately, how it was the product of the government’s dereliction of duty. Some of the activists’ voices broke, faces reddened, and spit flew as they passionately narrated their struggles with their children’s asthma and their neighbors’ affliction with cancer, some of whom had died.
One of the Anglo officials interjected with exasperation, “You know, I had cancer for many years, and it was very difficult for me and my family too. You guys are not the only ones who get cancer; and cancer is not just caused by air pollution!” Most of us, immediately slack-jawed, gasped. Although we could understand his health struggle, his empathy deficit, frosty delivery, and ill-advised timing guilted the activists into no longer sharing about their cancers because theirs were not as worthy as his. The emotional manipulation was chilling. He left the women with the same feeling they had experienced when a state representative had patronized them for ostensibly “procrastinating” on reading a phonebook-sized environmental impact report (with shoddy Spanish translation) and concluded that the community’s request for more time was baseless.
How do the women resist? Beyond yelling back, tearing up, and bringing their coughing children to public comments—that is, denormalizing institutional emotional assaults—they prioritize emotional support for one another. For instance, a touchpoint for the immigrants’ politics was when they testified about their asthmatic children and the brown air at their Los Angeles Unified School District schools that curbed PE classes, and officials would quip, “Why don’t you just move, then?” Notwithstanding the myopia of privilege embedded in such a retort, even a slight improvement in air quality could mean the difference between an asthma attack or a preempted one, between, in the ultimate, life and death.
When I asked the activists why they roundly rejected moving to another part of LA, they echoed the sentiments of Tanya, a Mexican immigrant mother of high schoolers who lived in a vortex of diesel in West Long Beach. She huffed, “Well, if I want to leave, I’ll leave! If I don’t, I won’t! I would be leaving them all alone (shaking her head)!” Tanya was indignant not just because the question presupposed a false choice, but because it had no regard for the value that she and other activists placed on fighting for one’s community. If she left them all alone, she may have preempted early death for her and her family, true, but who would fight for her neighbors?—certainly not BP and certainly not the government. Indeed, activists like Tanya were far from unclear on the deadly consequences of her “choice.”
In this way, we cannot understand immigrants’ fight for cleaner air in LA without centering the physical and emotional violence of state-sanctioned environmental racism and classism. We must also center how Asian and Latina immigrant women resist by taking care of each other’s bodies and emotional lives—by embodying what they deem the true meaning of citizenship. As well, perhaps we could all play our part by considering these immigrant women and their children and how much oil, diesel, sickness, and premature death are wrapped up in our buying habits every holiday season.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
Encourage Your Students to Apply for Honors Program
Encourage your junior and senior students to go deeper in sociology by participating in ASA’s Honors Program, which provides undergraduate sociology students a rich introduction to the professional life of sociologists. Admitted students will have several professional development opportunities during the ASA Annual Meeting, such as presenting their work in a roundtable paper session and participating in workshops on careers and graduate school. Participation in the Honors Program requires nomination by a sociology faculty member from the student’s college or university. The student’s completed application, including a research paper, curriculum vitae, unofficial or official transcript, and a faculty nomination letter, should be submitted online by February 18, 2022. Click here for more information and to access the application.
Invitation to Participate: Strategies for Recruiting Students; Documenting Publicly Engaged Projects
ASA members have the opportunity to participate in two national surveys recently launched by the National Humanities Alliance (NHA): The Humanities Recruitment Survey and the Survey of Public Humanities Projects and Infrastructure.
NHA’s 2019 Humanities Recruitment Survey culminated in the report Strategies for Recruiting Students to the Humanities, which featured over 100 exemplary initiatives from a variety of institutions. This new Humanities Recruitment Survey aims to surface more strategies that are succeeding in attracting and retaining students to the humanities, with a particular focus on engaging students from historically underrepresented groups. It also asks about enrollment trends in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. NHA plans to publish another major resource based on the results of this new survey.
The Survey of Public Humanities Projects is designed to collect publicly engaged humanities projects (including experiential learning and other high-impact humanities initiatives) and learn more about the campus-based infrastructure that supports this work. It builds on the work of NHA’s Humanities for All initiative, which supports the public humanities in higher education. Using results from this survey, NHA plans to publish a major resource on the campus and scholarly society infrastructure that support publicly engaged humanities work.
We are partnering with NHA to ensure that examples from sociology departments and scholars are fully represented in these resources. NHA will also share the results from our discipline with us to help us better understand the range of strategies that are being deployed to encourage students to study sociology and the range of publicly-engaged research projects and infrastructure in our discipline.
Click here to access the Humanities Recruitment Survey and click here to access the Survey of Public Humanities Projects and Infrastructure.
Apply to be a TRAILS Editorial Board Member
If you’re interested in supporting teaching and learning at ASA, consider joining the TRAILS Editorial Board. As a board member, your main responsibility will be reviewing submissions to TRAILS and mentoring authors through the publication process, which is a crucial component of ASA’s commitment to promoting innovative teaching techniques and developing scholarly teachers.
Newly appointed editors will begin a three-year (renewable) term starting February 1. Applicants should be ASA members, have a PhD in sociology, and have a demonstrated commitment to teaching and learning in the discipline. A publication record in TRAILS is viewed favorably. Applications are being currently reviewed and will continue until positions are filled. To apply, send a letter describing your interest and qualifications for the position and a CV to [email protected] with the subject line “Editorial Board Application.” Learn more here.
