Simi Kang

Name
Simi Kang
Candidate statement
I am a queer, mixed Sikh American community advocate, educator, artist, and scholar. My work centers Southeast Asian American collaborative resistance as a site for imagining environmentally and economically just futures in Louisiana. It also values mutual aid—working as an educator for a decade, in coalition with Gulf South 4 a Green New Deal, and in supporting organizers in post-Uprising Minneapolis, I know care is essential to our collective survival.

My commitment to care and mutual aid will be central to my work as a Contingent Faculty Representative. This is particularly important as COVID and economic recession makes more of us academically and interpersonally precarious. I will extend Dr. Khúc’s insistence on valuing contingent leadership by: maintaining an advisory group of contingent faculty, reaffirming the need for contingency support, and ensuring our ongoing access to spaces of personal and scholarly development.

The most precarious AAAS members understand the successes and pitfalls of our field(s) more intimately than anyone else—I will continue to hold the association accountable to us.

I am currently a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in UC Santa Barbara's Asian American Studies Department. I hold a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.