Diane Wong

This book explores the overlooked role of Asian Americans in the contemporary housing justice movement with an emphasis on New York City. Drawing on a variety of qualitative methods including ethnography, participatory mapping, archival research, augmented reality, and oral history interviews, this project offers a nuanced understanding of the conditions under which Asian Americans are active in the making of urban space and urban politics, shifting away from a common narrative that portrays them as disengaged from democratic processes. This work is about emplacement as much as it is about displacement, it is about what Asian women, youth, immigrants, and elders are doing to stay in place from tenants fighting eviction, neighborhood activists, grassroots groups, housing attorneys, language interpreters, archivists, artists, and mutual aid collectives. Fundamentally, this work broadens the scope of how we think about Asian American activism and where it unfolds on the ground, importantly shaping how we understand democratic citizenship and political possibilities in urban immigrant communities.