Anna Romina Guevarra, PhD

Professor Anna Romina Guevarra  served as the program's director for 12 years, from 2012-2024. She began as Director in 2012 when it was Asian American Studies (ASAM) and then became the Founding Director of the Global Asian Studies Program in 2016 and led the pursuit of a B.A. in GLAS in 2022 - the first major of its kind that draws from both ethnic studies and area studies in the Midwest. She is a Co-PI of the UIC AANAPISI Initiative and the Social Justice and Human Rights Cluster and a member of the Diaspora Cluster at UIC. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and community-engaged work focus on immigrant and transnational labor, the geopolitics of carework, the Philippine diaspora, food studies, and critical race/ethnic studies. She is the award-winning author of several works including the book, Marketing Dreams and Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers, an ethnography that narrates the multilayered racialized and gendered processes of brokering Filipino labor, the Philippines’ highly-prized “export, an edited volume, Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age and numerous articles in interdisciplinary journals.

Professor Guevarra is currently working on three projects. One explores the mediation of carework through robotic technology and artificial intelligence and its impact on the delivery of care, notions of racialized and gendered skill, and the geopolitical boundaries between the global north and south. Two projects are in collaboration with Prof. Gayatri Reddy: one is a public history project (Dis/Placements: A People's History of Uptown Chicago) they co-founded that maps and narrates stories of displacements and everyday people's resistance in Uptown, a Northside Chicago neighborhood. Another collaborative project explores the relationship between diaspora and empire by mapping the spatial and temporal configurations of global/local foodways by using the sea as an analytic optic for tracing and mapping the diasporic currents of a confection, (bi)bingka’s, multivalent and culinary trajectories in South and Southeast Asia.

Professor Guevarra teaches courses on Global Asia in Chicago, Asian/Asian American Women in the Global Economy, Asian America and Transnational Feminism, Cultural Politics of Asian American Food, and Asian Markets, Corporations, and Social Justice. In 2012 and 2013, she co-taught (with Gayatri Reddy) a study abroad course on "Labor, Gender, Food, and Social Justice" in India. She was a former Public Voices Fellow in the OpEd Project.

2021  “Coding Care” in Redesigning AI: Work Democracy, and Justice in the Age of Automation, edited by Daron Acemoglu (Cambridge, MA: Boston Review Forum 18 (46.2).

2021    Public History Project: Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown Chicago (Co-PI with Dr. Gayatri Reddy (http://dis-placements.com) 

2021 November 2   OpEd:  “Winthrop Family and Black Resilience on the North Side of Chicago,” (with Gayatri Reddy), in The Chicago Reporter

2021 August 19  OpEd:  “Illinois becomes first state to mandate teaching Asian American history in K-12” in Truthout 

2021 August 13    OpEd:  “Afro-Asian Solidarities and Reclaiming the Erasure of Women” in Ms. Magazine 

2020 October 20   OpEd: “Essential, Not Disposable” in Chicago Reader

2020   “The Source of Actual Terror: The Philippine Macho-Fascist Duterte” (with Maya Arcilla). In Feminist Studies, 46(2): pp. 489-494.

2018. “Mediations of Care: Brokering Labour in the Age of Robotics.” Special Issue on “Practices of Brokerage and the Making of Migration Infrastructures in Asia.” Pacific Affairs vol 91(4): 739-759

2016. “The Legacy of Undesirability: Filipino TNTs, “Irregular Migrants,” and “Outlaws” in the US Cultural Imaginary.” In Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora(eds by Martin F. Manalansan and Augusto Espiritu, NYU Press, pp. 355-374)

2015. “Techno-Modeling Care: Racial Branding, Dis/embodied Labor  and “Cybraceros” in Korea, Frontiers: Journal of Women’s Studies 36(3): 139-159 (Special Issue on Transnational Feminism)

2014. “Supermaids: The Racial Branding of Global Filipino Care Labour,” book chapter in Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy, and Politics, edited by Bridget Anderson and Isabel Shutes, pp. 130-150, Palgrave Macmillan.

2013. Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age (co-edited with Nilda Flores-Gonzalez, Maura Toro-Morn, and Grace Chang). University of Illinois Press.

2013. “The Public Manager,” book chapter in Figures of Southeast Asia Modernity, edited by Joshua Barker, Erik Harms, and Johan Lindquist; University of Hawai’i Press.

2010. Marketing dreams, Manufacturing heroes: The transnational labor brokering of Filipino workers (Rutgers University Press)

2006. (October). The Balikbayan Researcher: Negotiating vulnerability in fieldwork with Filipino labor brokers. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(5): 526-551.

2006. (September). Managing “vulnerabilities” and “empowering” migrant Filipina workers: The Philippines’ overseas employment program. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture, 12(5):523-541.

Professor Guevarra serves or has served on the advisory board of three non-profit organizations: Full Spectrum Features, CIRCA-Pintig,  the Alliance of Filipinos for Immigrant Rights and Empowerment (AFIRE), and Northside Action for Justice (NA4J)

2003 PhD, Sociology, University of California San Francisco

1996 BA, Women’s Studies, University of California, Irvine

1996 BA, Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine

2019 (4/16)       Distinguished Lecture, 42^nd Harry Lee Waterfield Distinguished Lecture in Public Affairs,  “The Robots are Coming! Unpacking the Ethics of Automation in the 21^st Century,” Murray State University, Murray, KY

2019 (3/14)       Keynote Address, 38^th Annual Gender Studies Symposium, “From Heroes, Supermaids, to TNTs: Racial Branding and the Geopolitics of Carework,” Lewis and Clark University, Portland, OR

2018 (4/27)     Invited presentation, “From Filipina Supermaids to Cybraceros: Brokering Labor in the Age of Robotics." Conference on Migration: Discipline and Displacement, Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas, Austin

2017 (6/1)       Keynote Address, “Simulations of Care: Brokering Labor in the Age of Robotics.” Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

 2017(2/23-2/24) Invited presentation, “Bumbay Bibingka: In the Footsteps of Indian Sepoys in the Philippines,” Workshop on ‘Scales of Alimentation Between Europe and Asia,’ EHESS, Paris, France

• Mediations of Care: Robotic Technology, Gender, and Labor:” This project explores the mediation of carework through robotic technology and artificial intelligence its impact on the delivery of care, notions of racialized and gendered skill, and the geopolitical boundaries between the global north and south.
• Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown Chicago (with Gayatri Reddy): This project traces displacements of people and struggles over land, housing, and community in the city of Chicago, raising critical questions about how we understand urban “development” or renewal, who this development is for, and how it is structured. We begin this excavation in the northside neighborhood of Uptown, a neighborhood uniquely shaped and formed by multiple forms of displacement - local, national, and transnational, and reflective of active resistance to such geopolitical and economic displacement, racial segregation, and state and imperial violence. The project visualizes these varied displacements as well as the active place-making that, over the course of the last century, produced Uptown as a multiracial anomaly in Chicago, the most segregated city in America. https://dis-placements.com
• Bumbay Bibingka: Culinary Crosscurrents and a Tale of Three Cities (with Gayatri Reddy): this project explores the spatial and temporal configurations of global/local foodways using a dessert, bibingka’s multivalent culinary trajectories in South and Southeast Asia as the lens through which to do so.

Public History Project: Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown Chicago (co-PI Gayatri Reddy)