Vā Moana Reading Group March 2023

For our recent reading group, we hosted Dr. Kevin Escudero (Brown University, USA). Kevin kindly offered to workshop with us a chapter from the manuscript of a book he is working on about immigrant and Indigenous activists' participation in Guam's decolonisation movement. The project grows out of a broader interest in the relationship between immigrant political activism and Indigenous movements for self-determination, particularly in the context of the U.S. empire, military expansion, and settler colonialism. We very much enjoyed the stimulating talanoa on Kevin’s chapter.

Kevin Escudero (PhD, UC Berkeley; MSL, Yale Law School) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology, Population Studies and Training Center, and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown University. Escudero's research and teaching interests include comparative studies of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity; U.S. empire and settler colonialism; immigration and citizenship; social movements; and law. His book, Organizing While Undocumented (New York University Press, 2020) examines undocumented Asian, Latinx, queer, and formerly undocumented activists' strategic use of an intersectional movement identity. The book draws on more than five years of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with immigrant rights activists in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. 

If you are interested in joining the reading group, please get in touch via autpacificspaces@gmail.com. This is open to Vā Moana affiliates and candidates, Māori and Pacific postgraduate students, as well as extended 'āiga and those in their final year of their undergraduate degrees.