Profile picture for user elizaber@ucr.edu

Elizabeth Hanna Rubio

Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of California-Riverside

About Elizabeth

Rubio builds on her work as a community organizer to conduct research that responds to emergent questions in leftist social justice spaces. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Dreams Beyond Recognition. Based on six years of ethnographic research with undocumented Asian American organizers, the book examines the fraught politics of multiracial coalition-building and enacting abolitionist immigrant justice.

Publications

"Of Mothers and Monsters: Transformative Justice and the Politics of Intergenerational Healing" Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 44, no. 3 (2023): 117-136.

Explores how Asian American transformative justice practitioners approach intergenerational harm within Asian American families from an abolitionist perspective. Argues that transformative justice approaches to intergenerational harm are central to efforts to move towards a horizon that is at once Asian American, feminist, and abolitionist.

"Black-Asian Solidarities and the Impasses of “How-To” Anti-Racisms" Journal for the Anthropology of North America 24, no. 1 (2021): 16-31.

Builds on work that has critiqued liberal anti-racisms for detracting from abolitionst struggles against racialized injustice. Theorizes the limitations that “how-to anti-racisms” place on transgressive multiracial coalition building and demonstrates how “how-tos” destabilize coalition building by overdetermining resolutions to conflict.

"“We Need to Redefine What We Mean by Winning”: NAKASEC’s Immigrant Justice Activism and Thinking Citizenship Otherwise" Amerasia Journal 45, no. 2 (2019): 157–172.

Explores undocumented Asian American activists' evolving critique of legal recognition as the primary goal of immigrant justice work. Follows organizers though a 22-day vigil at the White House, a 1700-mile bike tour, and the creation of an undocumented housing collective, arguing that activists' call to “re-define what we mean by by winning” speaks to an emergent conceptualization of citizenship outside state inclusion.