Julia Shizuyo Popham

Candidate statement

My name is Julia Shizuyo Popham (she/her) and I’m a mixed race, Japanese American woman with roots in the coalmines of Rock Springs, Wyoming. I also am a doctoral student in Ethnic Studies at CU Boulder exploring how art from the Amache WWII Incarceration Camp sheds light on how Japanese American artists navigated what it means to be human while being embedded in carceral systems that defined “the human” in proximity to whiteness. AAAS is becoming a home for me as I contend with what it means for myself and others to be “human” under the veils of settler colonialism and white supremacy and in the service of social justice. Indeed, I am passionate about social justice and as your AAAS student representative I would focus on ensuring that graduate and undergraduate student voices would push AAAS to take seriously the most pressing social justice issues of our time, like the genocide we are witnessing in Palestine. I also want to be a voice for students at institutions who may not be receiving the support they need because of a dearth of Asian American scholars, and intend to create spaces for community building and intellectual sharing of and for students.