Demiliza S Saramosing
Demiliza Sagaral Saramosing is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She holds graduate minors in the Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, Sexuality (RIDGS), and American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) programs.
Her dissertation is entitled, "Messin’ Wid Paradise: Kalihi & Oceanic Homeplace-Making In & Beyond the City With No Pity." In the past 30 years, immigrant, second-generation, and Kānaka Maoli youth have grown up in the urban inner-city of Kalihi, Honolulu while navigating the everyday structures of racism, classism, inter-residential conflict, and gender and sexual violence in the occupying settler state of Hawaiʻi. This is an auto-ethnographic project based on participant observation and in/formal talk story methods that examines the experiences of a cohort of young adults from Kalihi which include some who still live in Kalihi and some who have moved away to other places in Hawaiʻi or to the continent. I seek to understand their relational lives, cultural identities, and positionalities amidst colonial legacies and present-day issues of poverty, racialized policing, and assimilation. I will also discuss my own experiences as I come from this same cohort. I ask the question: How do they express themselves, understand their evolving positions, and navigate their senses of (un)belonging amid marginalization in a globalized and transnational world?
While my work is in progress at this time, I expect to argue that this analysis will illuminate social injustices in “multicultural paradise” and inform our decolonial movements in Hawaiʻi. Messin’ Wid Paradise illustrates my analysis of what Kalihi youth offer to debates in Critical Youth Studies, Indigenous and Women of Color Feminisms, Queer of Color Critique, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and (Asian) Settler Colonialism Studies.
Demiliza is a recipient of the 2018-2019 Diversity of Views and Experiences Fellowship and the 2022-2023 Beverly and Richard Fink Fellowship.
Supervisors: David A. Chang and Martin Manalansan
Her dissertation is entitled, "Messin’ Wid Paradise: Kalihi & Oceanic Homeplace-Making In & Beyond the City With No Pity." In the past 30 years, immigrant, second-generation, and Kānaka Maoli youth have grown up in the urban inner-city of Kalihi, Honolulu while navigating the everyday structures of racism, classism, inter-residential conflict, and gender and sexual violence in the occupying settler state of Hawaiʻi. This is an auto-ethnographic project based on participant observation and in/formal talk story methods that examines the experiences of a cohort of young adults from Kalihi which include some who still live in Kalihi and some who have moved away to other places in Hawaiʻi or to the continent. I seek to understand their relational lives, cultural identities, and positionalities amidst colonial legacies and present-day issues of poverty, racialized policing, and assimilation. I will also discuss my own experiences as I come from this same cohort. I ask the question: How do they express themselves, understand their evolving positions, and navigate their senses of (un)belonging amid marginalization in a globalized and transnational world?
While my work is in progress at this time, I expect to argue that this analysis will illuminate social injustices in “multicultural paradise” and inform our decolonial movements in Hawaiʻi. Messin’ Wid Paradise illustrates my analysis of what Kalihi youth offer to debates in Critical Youth Studies, Indigenous and Women of Color Feminisms, Queer of Color Critique, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and (Asian) Settler Colonialism Studies.
Demiliza is a recipient of the 2018-2019 Diversity of Views and Experiences Fellowship and the 2022-2023 Beverly and Richard Fink Fellowship.
Supervisors: David A. Chang and Martin Manalansan
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