Nadia Kim, professor of Asian and Asian American Studies in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, has been honored with multiple awards for her latest book “Refusing Death”.
In our global cities today, immigrants of color and their children are bearing the brunt of a constant flow of consumer goods coming into the US from China and other manufacturing nations, which also depends heavily on oil. They are increasingly suffering from hyper-pollution at a local level as well as alarming rates of asthma and cancer due to their residential and workplace proximity to diesel-spewing shipping ports, freeways, rail yards, and oil refineries. Published by Stanford University Press, “Refusing Death” profiles Asian and Pacific Islander as well as undocumented Latina immigrant women behind a grassroots movement for environmental justice in the industrial-port belt of Los Angeles. Specifically, she highlights how these women are transforming our political landscape and redefining racism and classism through their fight for cleaner, more breathable air while also developing creative, unconventional, and loving ways to support and protect one another.
Kim was recently announced as a winner of the 2022 American Sociological Association’s (ASA’s) Best Book Award from the Race, Gender, and Class section and the Asia and Asia America section. “Refusing Death” is also a Silver Award Winner of the 2022 Nautilus Book Awards in the Social Change & Social Justice category. Additionally, the book received an honorable mention from the ASA Latino/a/x Sociology section and from its Sociology of Emotions section.
Kim’s research focuses on US race and citizenship inequalities regarding Korean/Asian Americans and South Koreans, race and nativist racism in Los Angeles (e.g., 1992 LA Unrest), immigrant women activists, environmental racism and classism, and comparative racialization of Latinxs, Asian Americans, and Black Americans. Throughout her work, Kim’s approach centers (neo)imperialism, transnationality, and the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Kim is also the author of the multi-award-winning “Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA” (Stanford, 2008); and of award-winning journal articles on race and assimilation and on racial attitudes. Kim has also long organized on issues of immigrant rights, affirmative action, and environmental justice, some of which she has incorporated into her research. She and/or her work have also appeared (inter)nationally on National Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, Radio Korea, and local TV news and in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Korea Times, NYLON Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.
“The Race, Gender and Class committee was impressed by the application of a raced, gendered, and classed lens to experiences with environmental racism in Los Angeles. The book is not only excellently written but the contributions to theory are significant in that it adds nuance to existing scholarship on the sociology of race, gender, and class via discussion of youth, emotions, immigration, and environmental injustices,” said Rocío R. García, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Arizona State University.
