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ABSTRACT:Today, when we hear about refugees, we usually think about people who migrated due to war or disaster. However, refugees are also being born and dying in haphazardly constructed spaces. Being born in a host or temporary country does not provide you any more rights or security than other refugees and dying doesn’t make your physical body any freer from the discrimination in a geographical space. “Refugee is a new kind of human being” and this includes the physical body. The world is an earthly state for human existence. The world is the inhabitance of earth of the human race.

Dr. Sylvia Nam is Assistant Professor of anthropology here at UCI. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests in cities, markets, and expertise. Her work brings together anthropological engagements with value alongside geographical theories on the production of space as the cutting edge of accumulation.

ABSTRACT:The U.S. has historically racialized the Latinx community as a homogenous group and have failed to acknowledge how the various ethnic groups have complex histories and are far from homogenous despite their similarities. The Latinx community in the U.S. is a heterogenous and diverse community and there is a need to come to terms with the tensions and solidarities that emerge. By the 1980s, Los Angeles (LA) was a city well-established by the Mexican community, particularly Mexicans with a legal status.

ABSTRACT:My work explores how urban community gardens can be spaces of social and environmental justice in communities of color facing uncertainty and the threat of displacement due to gentrification. Longtime Latinx residents of central Santa Ana are being displaced by the forces of gentrification, but despite this, residents have developed creative strategies not only to combat unwanted development, but also to (re)create the community they want to live in today and for the foreseeable future.

ABSTRACT:Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) infamously theorized that “place is security and space is freedom – we are attached to the former and long for the other.” Recent scholarship lamented the demise of queer space in many American cities, claiming a societal shift towards a ‘post-gay’ culture. Some link the dissolution of the ‘gayborhood’ in recent years to social assimilation and mobility (Ghaziani 2014), whereas others implicate resurgent gentrification among other economic forces of neoliberal hegemony for the changing character of ‘gayborhoods’ (Doan and Higgins 2011).

Using Stephanie Batiste’s theory of kinetic affect and Sara Ahmed’s framework of the Orient, the paper seeks to center the experience of the Filipino body---both national and diasporic bodies--- as it moves through the affective space of ambivalence in relation to the conversation of race-making in dance.