Elizabeth Hanna Rubio is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Trained in the tradition of activist anthropology, she is an ethnographer of social movements, immigrant life, and the internal dynamics of leftist organizing spaces. After receiving her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine in 2021, she served as a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton.

 

Elizabeth is currently completing a monograph titled Dreams Beyond Recognition: Asian American Immigrant Justice Work and Alternatives to Liberalism’s False Promises.  Based on seven years of ethnographic research with undocumented Asian American activists in Southern California, Washington D.C., and Chicago, the book argues that dominant liberal logics focused entirely on state recognition both constrain and obscure the already-existing diversity of undocumented freedom dreams. Her peer-reviewed work has also appeared in publications such as Amerasia Journal; The Journal for the Anthropology of North America; Frontiers: A Women’s Studies Journal; and The LA Review of Books.

 

Prior to her career in academia, Professor Rubio was a community organizer in the Maryland - DC metropolitan area, where she organized primarily with undocumented tenants, youth, and survivors of domestic violence in a number of local and state-wide campaigns. She builds on her experiences to remain an active presence in activist networks, where, at organizations like Orange County Environmental Justice, Chicago’s HANA Center, UndocuBlack Network, and the National Korean American Services and Education Consortium, she hosts frequent workshops and popular education sessions on matters relating to abolition, Asian American history, and multiracial coalition building.