James Huỳnh, MA, MPH

Scholar
Organizer
Educator

I am a gay, queer, Vietnamese American scholar-organizer, educator, photographer, and lover of Shiba Inus. I am the son of Vietnamese refugees who came to the U.S. from the city of Huế. I grew up in desert-turned-suburbia Fontana, CA, home to a vibrant community of working-class people of color.

Research

At UCLA, I am a PhD candidate in the Community Health Sciences department at the Fielding School of Public Health with a minor in Gender Studies. I am also a Health Policy Research Scholar, a program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for doctoral students who are committed to using research to advance health equity through policy change and build a Culture of Health. Starting Fall 2024, I am excited to announce that I will be joining the Department of Health Management & Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health as a tenure-track assistant professor of anti-racist health policy.

My academic and activist commitments are to issues of health inequities in communities of color, immigrants, refugees, Indigenous people, and LGBTQ people.

I study how queer communities of color cultivate their own cultures of health while resisting racial capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy. I use ethnographic and social network analysis methods to explore how these communities construct various family and kinship structures, and how they use grassroots organizing to create more life-affirming futures. By using a community-based participatory research approach, my scholarship aims to build the capacity of queer people of color to address issues on their own terms and to rethink economic and social policies as a starting point for fostering healthy communities.

  • Exp. 2024 – PhD Community Health Sciences with minor in Gender Studies – UCLA

  • 2019 – MA Asian American Studies & MPH Community Health Sciences – UCLA

  • 2015 – BA Human Biology – Stanford University

Recipient of E. Richard Brown Social Justice Award 2023 given by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health

Participant in inaugural Critical Refugee Studies writing retreat

Presenting on culturally responsive aging policy at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Scholars Summer Institute

“On the one hand, it is true that not all families of color affirm their queer sons and daughters. On the other hand, the generalized gay community often feels like a sea of whiteness to queers of color, and thus the imagined ethnic family is often a refuge. It is a space where all those elements of the self that are fetishized, ignored, and rejected in the larger queer world are suddenly revalorized.”

— José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown