Peter Kim is a PhD candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies, and his research examines the ways public institutions inform, shape, and mediate the subject formation of urban youth of color. In particular, he explores how public schools, the juvenile justice system, non-profit community-based organizations, and local government play active roles in how Southeast Asian American youth in Oakland form notions of identity, community, culture and citizenship. Using frameworks of (anti)blackness, afro-pessimism, and social death, he explores possibilities of liberated and empowered subjectivity within oppositional identities (ie: the gang member, the refugee, the delinquent, the criminal). Peter is a recipient of the Berkeley Fellowship (2010-2014). For over 15 years, he directed community-based youth programming at the East Bay Asian Youth Center (EBAYC) in East Oakland, and for 7 years he oversaw funding and coordination of citywide violence prevention and intervention services for the City of Oakland, first in its Department of Human Services Department (Oakland Unite) and later in the city’s first Department of Violence Prevention, of which he was an integral part of its formation and development. Currently, Peter is a senior consultant at Bright Research Group which provides public system agencies, community-based organizations and philanthropy with research, evaluation, strategic planning and capacity building services that prioritize a social justice and racial equity lens.
(bio photo by p.kim; mural by Luqman; Oakland Chinatown, 2014)
Asian American History; Race Formation and Critical Race Theory; Identity and Subject Formation; Criminalization of Urban Youth; Video Ethnography