Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, professor of Asian American studies and history, faculty director of the UCI Humanities Center, and founding director of the Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism, and Belonging (C-LAB), received a $500,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation for a two-year project that studies the origins of wealth inequality in Orange County, California. In consultation with research collaborator Priscilla Leiva, Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Wu seeks to advance scholarship on the history of land, race and Indigeneity in Orange County and analyze how this history shapes contemporary forms of economic and racial inequality.
The grant for HOPE-OC will support the creation of a multi-disciplinary team of faculty, post-doctoral scholars, graduate students and community-based researchers. A critical part of the project will be to promote public dissemination of this scholarship and community dialogue about the contemporary ramifications of this history. To those ends, HOPE-OC will engage with community scholars and result in public-facing outcomes.
“The COVID-19 pandemic transformed our lives and exposed long-standing inequalities along the lines of race, gender and class,” Wu explains. “HOPE-OC provides an opportunity to investigate the historic and contemporary ramifications of these inequalities.”
Orange County (OC) is perhaps most well-known for Disneyland, its beaches and the predominantly wealthy and white communities in this region. Historically, OC served as a suburban destination for white flight from the Los Angeles metropolis and also one of the main incubators of political conservatism. However, OC, ranked sixth nationally for its population and 3rd in the state, is also home to racially and economically diverse communities. Nearly half of the residents speak a language other than English at home, and approximately 1 in 10 residents live in poverty.
In addition to addressing the history of Orange County generally, Wu and her team will research the history of the Irvine Ranch and the establishment of the James Irvine Foundation. They will explore how this history can serve as an example of how the acquisition and possession of land, and a particular vision of development, might lead to socio-economic divides in the city of Irvine and Orange County more broadly.
At UC Irvine, HOPE-OC dovetails with the research justice mission of C-LAB, a center supported by the Office of Research and based in the School of Humanities that works across the Schools of Biological Sciences, Education, Law, Medicine, Physical Sciences, Public Health, Social Ecology and Social Sciences. Its research justice approach foregrounds research questions, community-centered methodologies and the dissemination of findings that support the goals of social justice and collective repair.
For more information about HOPE-OC, please contact Professor Wu at j.wu@uci.edu.