Gentrification and the Future of Work in New York City's "Chinatowns" ?Book talk by Professor Tarry Hum and Samuel Stein Friday, April 27 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM Asian American / Asian Research Institute 25 West 43rd Street, Room 1000 between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan For more information & RSVP: http://www.aaari.info/18-04-27Hum.htm New York City's "Chinatowns" are becoming increasingly inhospitable to both long-term residents and recent immigrants from working class backgrounds. This talk, based on an article for Asian American Matters: A New York Anthology, utilizes employment data from the New York State Department of Labor (DOL) to document fundamental shifts in Chinatown, Flushing and Sunset Park's local economies, and examines the transition of New York City's "Chinatowns" from sites of surplus labor to sites of surplus capital. Using this Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data,Tarry Hum and Samuel Stein compared the neighborhood economies of New York City's "Chinatowns" during two periods, in 2000 (pre-9/11 crisis), and in 2015 (post-2008 "Great Recession"). The transformations that Chinatown, Sunset Park and Flushing are undergoing not only are remaking the neighborhoods' built environments and economic sectors, but also the modes of struggle labor utilizes to reproduce itself and make political claims. Tarry Hum is a Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College/CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn's Sunset Parkwhich received a 2015 Honorable Mention for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning's Paul Davidoff Award. Hum is co-editing a forthcoming volume from Temple University Press, Immigrant Crossroads: Globalization, Incorporation, and Placemaking in Queens, NY. Samuel Stein is a geography PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and an Urban Studies instructor at Hunter College. In addition to studying and teaching urban geography, he worked as a researcher, organizer, and planner on numerous New York City union campaigns, tenant mobilizations, and public policy initiatives. His writing on urban planning politics has been appeared in The Journal of Urban Affairs, Metropolitics, Jacobin, and many other magazines and journals. In 2018, Verso will publish his first book, a critical take on planning in today's real estate-driven urban political economy.