Laureen D. Hom is an experienced researcher, writer, and program manager based in California. She received her Ph.D. in Planning, Policy, and Design with an emphasis in Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She also has an M.P.H. in Sociomedical Sciences (Urbanism & the Built Environment concentration) from Mailman School at Columbia University and a B.A. in Anthropology and Art History from University of California, Los Angeles.
Laureen's expertise is on community development politics in urban Chinatowns and Asian American spaces. She has published academic and policy papers about gentrification politics in Los Angeles Chinatown; the history of the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco Chinatown; and the growth of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities across Orange County, California. Her research is interdisciplinary and in conversation with scholarship across different fields, including Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Urban Studies, Urban Planning, Public Health, Public Administration, Sociology, History, and Political Science. Her professional experience includes administrative and tenured faculty positions in universities, along with professional and civic engagement experiences working on policy advocacy, program management, and evaluation for health, housing, and social service services with non-profit organizations. Her combined experiences, as well as her identity as a Chinese American woman whose family migration history in and out of California can be traced back to the early 20th Century, are integral to shaping her work.
The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles is the culmination of my research on Los Angeles Chinatown that examines community politics and gentrification since the 1970s. I interrogate how community leaders are responding to urban pressures that shape neighborhood development and what that means for creating community, political belonging, and a just future for Chinatown and beyond.
I wrote the book after conducting over 4 years of intensive fieldwork in the 2010s in the neighborhood. It includes interviews with community leaders and activists across generations, participant-observations in the neighborhood, and archival research spanning 80 years of Chinatown's history.
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