Yen Le Espiritu

Yen Espiritu received her Ph.D. from UC Los Angeles in 1990. She is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UCSD. Focusing on Asian America, her research has sought to challenge the homogeneous descriptions of communities of color and the narrowness of mutually exclusive binaries by attending to generational, ethnic, class, and gender variations within constructed racial categories. In particular, her work has called attention to the ways in which racialized ethnicity is relational rather than atomized and discrete and the ways in which group identities necessarily form through interaction with other groups "through complicated experiences of conflict and cooperation" and in structural contexts of power.

Prof. Espiritu's Web Page