Michael Nishimura

Graduate Student
mnishimura@ucsb.edu

Office Location: 

3021

Specialization: 

Race, Class, and Gender; Policing and Incarceration; Asian American Studies; Culture; Ethnography; Abolitionist Praxis

Education: 

BA, Vassar College

MSc, London School of Economics and Political Science

Bio: 

Michael Nishimura (he/him) is a PhD candidate studying the nexus between race, class, and gender within the U.S. carceral state and the global punishment regime. His work focuses specifically on how Asian racialization is constructed through and complicit in the expansion of carcerality. His previous research has examined the "double punishment" of formerly incarcerated non-U.S. citizens facing ICE detention and deportation as a continuation of colonial power relations, as well as how Asian American police officers construct their positionalities as model modern workers through gendered and racial essentialist schemas. 

His dissertation work centers on the experiences of formerly incarcerated Asian American and Pacific Islander Americans in California. Using ethnography, interviews, and archives of policing, incarceration, and migration, he critically engages "reentry" processes, how organizers build solidarity and fight against the repression of the carceral state, and how precarious labor and livelihoods complicate theorizations of Asian and Pacific Islander racialization. Linking local policing to global infrastructures of recurring exploitation and expropriation of people displaced and dispossessed by U.S. war, he thinks through imperialist relations and systems of punishment grounded in an abolitionist politic. 
 
Publications:
 
Nishimura, Michael. 2024. "Model Guardians: The Gendered Racialization of Asian American Police Officers." Social Problems. Advance Online Publication. doi: 10.1093/socpro/spae046. 
 
Nishimura, Michael. 2024. “Lifetimes of Punishment: The Imperial Feedback Loop of Anti-Asian Violence.” Sociological Inquiry 94(2):491–512. doi: 10.1111/soin.12579.