1983

My research, teaching and activism have addressed how immigration brings about dramatic changes in people's lives, looking particularly at the realm of gender and work, and now, at movements for social change. I was a graduate student in the 1980s. Berkeley was a wonderful place to live. The campus offered so much, and I liked the radical mystique of it all, but truthfully, as a graduate student I was quite alienated from the Department of Sociology. There was a lot of posturing in seminars and benign neglect from professors.

Tomoji Nishikawa,　Ph.D. (aka Tomoji Ishi), our dear friend, colleague, husband, father, son, and a co-founder of Japan Pacific Resource Network, died at home on Tuesday, 26 August 2003, following his courageous ten-year battle with brain tumor.

I've met a lot of people for whom graduate school was a struggle, but the Berkeley department was unfailingly supportive. On the first day of orientation, Claude Fischer encouraged us to dream big, telling us that Berkeley dissertations often became books. Later, Claude patiently helped socialize me about research methods, professional writing and the profession. As I did my dissertation research and writing, I could always count on Arlie Hochschild to ask the questions I needed to answer and to help me distinguish the interesting ideas from the ones that were mundane.

I became a freshman college dropout on the occasion of Kent and Jackson State in 1970, worked for the UFW, was drafted by & then expelled from the US army, then worked for SEIU for 9 years. All this left me strangely fascinated with Habermas, strikes, & the difference between public & private sectors. Fired for recalcitrance by SEIU in 1982, I hurriedly earned a PhD in sociology at Berkeley in 1988, then joined the faculty @ Yale in 1989. My big regret re: Berkeley was my failure to stay & feast at length upon that sumptuous sociological smorgasbord.

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