RELEASE: AAPI Victory Alliance Announces New Advisory Board Members
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
July 8, 2021
PRESS CONTACT:
Abhi Rahman
Abhi.Rahman@Firesidecampaigns.com
RELEASE: AAPI Victory Alliance Announces New Advisory Board Members
WASHINGTON — The AAPI Victory Alliance is pleased to announce the creation of an advisory board for its think tank, the first ever think tank to focus on AAPI policy issues. These advisory board members are experts in various fields, from immigration to library science to media studies to climate change, and are eager to apply their substantive knowledge and a passion for their communities to help shape the mission and agenda of this think tank.
AAPI Victory Alliance Chair member Dr. Tung Nguyen issued the following statement:
“We are pleased to announce AAPI Victory Alliance’s new advisory board -- members of the AAPI community who will shape the mission of the first-ever AAPI think tank.These leaders are experts in their respective fields and have years of experience in shaping policy goals and issues that benefit the AAPI community. They are the best of what our communities have to offer and will represent the think tank well. We are beyond excited to work with our new advisory board members to advance a bold agenda that propels the AAPI community towards equity. This is the first step towards moving out of invisibility. Today and everyday, AAPIs matter and our communities and our strategic priorities will help shape the national agenda.”
Check out their bios below:
Christine Bacareza Balance
Christine Bacareza Balance is Associate Professor of Performing & Media Arts and Asian American Studies at Cornell University. Her writings on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, Asian American YouTube artists, Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, and spree killer Andrew Cunanan have been published in Women and Performance: a feminist journal, Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Women's Studies Quarterly (WSQ), and Theatre Journal. Her first book, Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2016), examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino/Filipino American popular music compose Filipino identities, publics, and politics.
Balance is collaborating with Prof. Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA) on the anthology, California Dreaming: Movement & Place in the Asian American Imaginary (University of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming). She is a former board member of KulArts, a Bay Area-based traditional and contemporary Filipino arts organization, and one-eighth of the New York-based indie rock band The Jack Lords Orchestra.
Manish Bapna
Manish Bapna is the interim president and CEO of the World Resources Institute (WRI), a global research organization that works to address the urgent sustainability challenges related to food, forests, water, climate, energy, cities and the ocean, and will soon transition to be the President and Chief Executive Officer at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
Bapna has worked at WRI since 2007. He has helped lead the global expansion of staff and divisions from 250 to over 1,400 across offices in the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and more. During a period of unprecedented growth at WRI, he oversaw the organization’s program work on climate change, energy, cities, food, forests, oceans and water, while helping transform the organization’s scale, reach and impact. Manish was a lead architect of several influential multi-stakeholder coalitions such as the Global Commission on Adaptation, NDC Partnership and US-China and US-India Track 2 Dialogues on Energy and Climate. He played a key role in increasing WRI’s budget to $180 million—a six-fold increase over 14 years. He also expanded diversity and inclusion within the organization, and led efforts to embed equity into WRI’s mission, culture and programs, leading a diverse taskforce to ensure implementation.
Manish is on the board of Meridian Institute and an Ambassador of the Open Government Partnership. He received graduate degrees in business and political and economic development from Harvard and an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from MIT. He is married to Geeta Nanda and they have two children, Laila and Arav.
Pawan Dhingra
Pawan Dhingra is an author, professor, curator, and diversity/equity/inclusion officer, currently serving as a professor in the Department of American Studies and Contributing Faculty Department of Anthropology/Sociology at Amherst College.
He and his work have been profiled on numerous media and public outlets, including the White House forum on AAPI heritage, The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Colorlines, Times of India, and many more. He has written award-winning books; his most recent is Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (New York University Press), which Library Journal described as, “[A] thought-provoking book … of interest to parents and educators,” and author Min Jin Lee described as a “fascinating exploration [that] gets to the root of education obsessions to expose our global anxieties, national biases, and parental hopes for our sons and daughters.”
Pawan also is Former Curator and Senior Advisor to the historic Smithsonian Institution’s Beyond Bollywood project. A frequent invited speaker, he has been profiled in the documentary, Breaking the Bee. He is honored to have been elected President of the Board of the South Asian American Digital Archive. He has been department chair and held tenured positions at Tufts University and Oberlin College. He is on Twitter @phdhingra1.
Silvia Lin Hanick
Silvia Lin Hanick is an Associate Professor and First Year Experience Librarian at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY). She received her MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and MA in Literature from the University of New Mexico. Lin Hanick is the co-author of Transforming Information Literacy Instruction: Threshold Concepts in Theory and Practice (2018), series co-editor for the Teaching Information Literacy Today series published by Libraries Unlimited, and senior co-chair for Rise: A Feminist Book Project for Ages 0-18, an ALA booklist.
Sangay Mishra
Sangay Mishra is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations (August 2021) at Drew University. He specializes in immigrant political incorporation, transnationalism, and racial and ethnic politics. His work engages with political participation of South Asian immigrants in the United States as well as countries of origin with a particular focus on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He has also been analyzing the experiences of Muslim American communities with law enforcement agencies.
His book, titled Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016 and Sage India in 2017. The book was awarded the best book on Asian America (2017) by the American Sociological Association’s section on Asia and Asian America.
Minh-Thu Pham
Minh-Thu Pham is a global policy entrepreneur working to defend democracy and empower civil society. She is co-founder of New American Voices, a pro-Biden super PAC that mobilizes Asian American voters and is Senior Advisor at Connect-Frontier LLC. Minh-Thu was a volunteer on the foreign policy teams for Pete for America and Biden for President. Previously, she was Executive Director of Global Policy at the United Nations Foundation (UNF); drawing on over 15 years of experience in international diplomacy, she led UNF’s efforts to help diplomats, think tank leaders, and global activists create and implement the Sustainable Development Goals. She was also a strategic planning and policy advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, focusing on U.S.-UN relations during a particularly difficult phase of that relationship, and she taught at Princeton.
Minh-Thu is a member of the Leadership Now Project; serves on the Dean's Advisory Council for Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs; is a fellow of the Truman National Security Project; a member of the Board of PIVOT, the nation’s leading progressive Vietnamese American political organization. She graduated from Duke University with a B.N. Duke Leadership Scholarship, and has a MPA from Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs.
A proud former refugee, Minh-Thu came to the U.S. with her family after the Vietnam War; she currently lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.
Linda Trinh Vo
Dr. Linda Trinh Vo is a professor and former chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Mobilizing an Asian American Community, co-author of Vietnamese in Orange County, and co-author of the report Transforming Orange County: Assets and Needs of Asian Americans & Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, along with co-editing numerous collections, including Keywords for Asian American Studies; Labor Versus Empire: Race, Gender, and Migration; Asian American Women: The “Frontiers” Reader; and Contemporary Asian American Communities: Intersections and Divergences. Dr. Vo was president of the national Association for Asian American Studies and has served in leadership and advisory roles with numerous community projects and organizations, including Viet Stories: Vietnamese American Oral History Project; Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Orange County; Orange County Asian & Pacific Islander Community Alliance; and Viet Film Fest. From her campus, she has received the Pedagogical Innovation: Civic Engagement Teaching Award and the Community Service Award.
Janelle Wong
Janelle Wong is a political scientist who studies Asian American political participation and public opinion. She is a professor in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Tom K. Wong
Tom K. Wong is an associate professor of political science and founding director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center (USIPC) at the University of California, San Diego. He served as an advisor to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI) under the Obama administration where he co-led the immigration portfolio and was recently appointed by Governor Gerry Brown to serve on the State of California 2020 Census Complete Count Committee (CCC). He is also Co-Director of the Human Rights and Migration program. His research focuses on the politics of immigration, citizenship, and migrant "illegality." His first book, Rights, Deportation, and Detention in the Age of Immigration Control, analyzes the immigration control policies of twenty-five Western immigrant-receiving democracies (Stanford University Press, 2015). In analyzing over 30,000 roll call votes on immigration-related legislation in Congress since 2005, his second book, The Politics of Immigration: Partisanship, Demographic Change, and American National Identity (Oxford University Press, 2017), represents the most comprehensive analysis to date on the contemporary politics of immigration in the United States.
Wong's research has been used by policymakers both in the U.S. and in Mexico, as well as by organizations that serve immigrant communities. Wong’s research has been used in several federal lawsuits to defend DACA, end family separation at the southern border, and prohibit indefinite child detention, among others. Wong and his work has been covered by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NPR and major media outlets across the country in hundreds of articles.
He is also on the board of New American Leaders, the California Immigrant Policy Center, and the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans. Wong also consults on campaigns elections and has run large-scale c3, c4, and independent expenditure campaigns specializing in mobilizing low-propensity voters of color and immigrant communities. He is lead evaluator for the Four Freedoms Fund civic engagement program and lead evaluator for the RISE Together Fund civic engagement program.