Anna Guevarra

Anna Romina Guevarra is the founding director of the Global Asian Studies Program and Co-PI of the AANAPISI Initiative and cofounder of the Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown, Chicago, public history project (https://dis-placements.com) at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and community-engaged work focus on immigrant and transnational labor, the geopolitics of care work, the Philippine diaspora, and critical race/ethnic studies. One of her projects explores the global commoditization and simulation of carework through the prism of robotic innovation -theorizing the divide between human and machine in the context of race, gender, and neoliberal capital, with implications for articulations of “skill,” carework, and the geopolitical boundaries between the North and South. Another project (with Gayatri Reddy) explores the relationship between diaspora and empire—tracing the history of the descendants of Indian sepoys who settled in the Philippines after the eighteenth-century British occupation of the country. Finally, as a cofounder of the Dis/Placements project, she is documenting, through oral histories and archival work, over 200 years of displacement in one Chicago neighborhood by mapping everyday people’s resistance in response to “urban renewal” policies that have displaced multiple communities. She is the author of the award winning 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 Filipinx labor, the Philippines’ highly prized “export,” and she is a coeditor of Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age. Her work has also appeared in interdisciplinary journals like Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Social Identities, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Pacific Affairs, and numerous edited anthologies.