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Laureen D. Hom is a community-centered scholar-practitioner specializing in Asian American Studies and Urban Studies. 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 professional experience includes administrative and tenured faculty positions in higher education, 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 scholary expertise focuses on community development, race/racialization, and political engagement in urban Chinatowns and Asian American spaces. Her notable publications include 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 work has been profiled in various media outlets, including CNN, LA Times, and NBC News, as well as cited in government and policy reports. Laureen's research is interdisciplinary and in conversation with scholarship across different fields, including Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, History, Political Science, Public Health, Public Policy and Administration, Sociology, Urban Planning, and Urban Studies. 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:
The Power of Chinatown:
Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles
Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles
The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles is the culmination of my research that examines community politics and gentrification in Los Angeles Chinatown since the 1970s. I interrogate how community leaders have been 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. Through the stories and analyses in the book, I show how urban Chinatowns continue to matter for Chinese and Asian Americans - despite narratives and perceptions that assume otherwise - and specifically how they serve as important, but contested sites of racialized and class-based political formations. I wrote this book after 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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