Simi Kang

Simi Kang is a Sikh American community advocate, educator, artist, and scholar whose work centers Asian American collaborative resistance as a site for imagining environmentally and economically just futures in Southeast Louisiana. In collaboration with Vietnamese and Cambodian American commercial fisherfolk, their community engagement and writing practices reject the imperative for structurally underserved communities to be resilient to extraction, environmental racism, and the violence of the US immigration system. It also, importantly, underscores the power of mutual aid and collaborative, multi-generational resistance. Simi is currently Assistant Professor of decolonial, anti-racist, intersectional feminisms in the Gender Studies Department at the University of Victoria, BC and a Monroe Fellow at Tulane University’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (2021-22). They hold a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and have a scholastic background in Asian American studies, environmental injustice, cultural anthropology, and creative writing.

Simi’s book manuscript, provisionally titled Refugee Environmentalism: Restoration & Climate Migration in Coastal Louisiana, examines how projects of coastal restoration and disaster mitigation acutely impact Vietnamese/American communities who rely on Louisiana’s most ecologically tenuous fishing grounds. You can learn more about Simi’s work here.