CCSRE Faculty Seminar Series | Willow Lung-Amam

Date
-
Event Sponsor
Sponsored by the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; Co-sponsored by the History Department; the Program on Urban Studies; and the American Studies Program
Location
Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460)

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CCSRE Faculty Seminar Series | Willow Lung-Amam

Trespassers?: Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia

Beyond the gilded gates of Google, little has been written about the suburban communities of Silicon Valley. Over the past several decades, the region’s booming tech economy spurred rapid population growth, increased racial diversity, and prompted an influx of immigration, especially among highly skilled and educated migrants from China, Taiwan, and India. At the same time, the response to these newcomers among long-time neighbors and city officials revealed complex attitudes in even the most well-heeled and diverse communities. Trespassers? takes an intimate look at the everyday life and politics inside Silicon Valley against a backdrop of these dramatic demographic shifts. At the broadest level, it raises questions about the rights of diverse populations to their own piece of the suburban American Dream. It follows one community over several decades as it transforms from a sleepy rural town to a global gateway and one of the nation's largest Asian American–majority cities. There, it highlights the passionate efforts of Asian Americans to make Silicon Valley their home by investing in local schools, neighborhoods, and shopping centers. It also provides a textured tale of the tensions that emerge over this suburb's changing environment. With vivid storytelling, Trespassers? uncovers suburbia as an increasingly important place for immigrants and minorities to register their claims for equality and inclusion.

Dr. Lung-Amam is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland. Her scholarship focuses on the link between social inequality and the built environment. It is concerned with how the conditions in disadvantaged communities are shaped by urban politics, policy, planning and design practice, and the changing metropolitan geographies of social and economic inequality. She has worked professionally on master-planning projects in low-income communities, and with non-profits, public agencies, and private firms on issues of public housing and community development.  Dr. Lung-Amam is the author of Trespassers? : Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia (University of California Press) and has written numerous articles on the topic of Asian immigrant suburbanization. Other recent projects have focused on equitable development, gentrification, the suburbanization of poverty, and the geography of opportunity. 

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