By Amanda Malone
Erica Maria Cheung ‘22 (Ph.D. Culture and Theory) will publish an academic article this year, in the edited volume Eating More Asian America (April 2025) with NYU Press. She’s at work on a second book project. She draws on her background in feminist pedagogy to facilitate meetings. And yet, Cheung is not a professor.
Cheung is currently the Communications Director at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders for Civic Empowerment-Education Fund (AAPI FORCE-EF), a statewide network of grassroots organizations providing infrastructure to build political power for working-class communities of color in California. She is also a writer and scholar, whose work is not only forthcoming with NYU Press, but can be found in public-facing outlets like The Huffington Post and Latina magazine. For over a decade, Cheung has brought her communications expertise to organizations for social change, including consulting positions with Planned Parenthood and the Asian American Pacific Islander Health Forum.
Cheung’s career strikes an enviable balance between interdisciplinary scholarship and public impact: she’s managed to bring her background in Asian American studies, gender studies and media studies, as well as her writing and pedagogical training, to bear on social-justice-oriented work. Her desire to forge a career at the intersection of these interests began even before her foray into graduate school. “I did my undergrad study at NYU,” Cheung says, after which she spent a year in New York. “I was transitioning from doing journalism to doing community-based work. But I was very young still, and I was very dissatisfied with my work, and missing gender studies. I was thinking: how can I make the impact that I want to make?”
At the encouragement of her friends, she applied to Ph.D. programs and enrolled in UCI’s Culture and Theory department. “My hope for myself in the program was to have this interdisciplinary education and learn how to teach and possibly write,” Cheung explains. “I didn't know anything about academic journal articles, really. I was more focused on trying to write for the public — what I really wanted to do.” While at UCI, she freelanced and worked on several projects outside of academia, which provided new avenues through which to pursue her interests.
Among those projects was the opportunity to consult for the Asian American Pacific Islander Health Forum. “They were putting together a teaching module and they needed someone to copy edit their materials,” she says. “I was doing this while I was finishing my Ph.D. in 2020, and it launched me into the professional, non-academic world again.” The next year, she was recruited to do communications, leading to her current role as Communications Director at AAPI FORCE-EF.
Work culture: a day in the life at AAPI FORCE-EF
Today, Cheung works remotely from Philadelphia, where she lives with her partner and cat. She leads her small team of three and spends a good portion of her week in meetings. Her work is fast-paced and varied: “Right now, with the Trump administration, we have to do a lot of rapid response,” she explains. “Because we work with so many organizations on the ground that are progressive and working for working-class people, a lot of my time is spent developing what we call ‘narrative,’ which is really documents with guidance on what's happening, providing our organizations with ways in which to share this information with their members.” Cheung also helps manage the organization’s editorial calendar and sets up the communications to launch advocacy efforts like letter-writing campaigns and petitions.
Pedagogy and politics: from the classroom to communities
Cheung has found many of the skills she gained during her Ph.D. useful in her current role. “Because of my experience with feminist pedagogy,” she explains, “my perspective on being somebody's supervisor is totally different. It’s more about mentorship. It's much more about sharing ideas, rather than having control.” It’s second nature to her to think carefully about what people are getting from meetings and to create active learning environments.
She’s also expanded her impact beyond the classroom to a larger network of work relationships, professional networks and those impacted by the mission of AAPI FORCE-EF. “It does feel good to be plugged into very real issues happening on the ground,” she says. In the classroom, impact can feel instantaneous: “You can really see that you may have changed [a student’s] opinion.” In the realm of politics, however, impact becomes larger scale: “How do we change the world view of five million people?”
Not just a theory: practical advice for Ph.D.s
Cheung believes that most academics, especially in the humanities, have a lot of transferable skills they may not give themselves credit for: analytical, writing, editing and facilitation skills that are extremely useful for many different positions.
For Ph.D. students struggling with the idea of doing something outside of academia, she encourages them to listen to their intuition and nurture supportive relationships. “Find those people who support you and just put yourself out there,” she says. Resources like RadComms can be great for students interested in social justice, communications or grant writing opportunities.
Though Cheung never imagined herself as strictly an academic, she’s found a way to follow her scholarly interests alongside her professional pursuits — balancing a desire for deep intellectual curiosity with a desire for her work to be accessible, applicable and creative. Cheung’s time in academia continues to inform both her writing and social-justice-oriented work: “It's been very rewarding for me to still be in the space of social justice, and still do Asian American community work, and also coalitional work with other communities of color in California. I use a lot of what I did in academia to help with not only my job but what I can contribute to the work that we're doing.”
Amanda Malone is a Ph.D. candidate in English at UC Irvine.
Interested in reading more from the School of Humanities? Sign up for our monthly newsletter.