Tufts Lunch & Learn Speaker Profile: Lai Ying Yu
Lai Ying Yu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, Tufts University. A one-time community organizer in Chinatown Boston, she teaches and writes about urban environmental history, critical race studies, and literary theory. Her dissertation-in-progress is entitled “Promise of the City: Intimate Publics and the Discourse of Urban Development.” She is a part-time lecturer at Northeastern University.
Can you tell me a little bit about your expertise?
Right now, I am finishing my dissertation in the English department. My interest is in urban study with a focus on literary representations of urban space over the 20th century. The class that I taught is based on my research interest, which is in thinking about the intersection between urban planning discourse and how literature was a way of entering the elite plane of how people discussed planning, and how that did not necessarily involve everyday people. So, my personal interest is really in urban planning discourse, about how people involved in the physical development, financing and even social reorganization of space talked about it. Also, how writers began to talk in different ways about urban planning as time went by.
What got you interested in the literary representations of urban spaces?
I was an English major so I was really comfortable in thinking about projects in the English department, and I also worked after finishing my undergrad as a community organizer for two years. That experience bridged my interests in English and urban planning. I was the community organizer at the Asian Community Development Corporation in Chinatown, which helped me learn a lot about what community organizing is and received a lot of support while studying the complexity of urban planning. My role was to work with the residents in their need for greater affordable housing. So that is where my interest in thinking about mapping came in, because mapping is one way of rethinking our relationships with space. Before I was a community organizer, I never thought about built space around me having a history. But with that experience I learned that even though the space around us seems fixed, it is potentially ever changing. Part of my class is about encouraging students to know the outcomes of changes in the spaces around us. So my short answer being, it was really my practical background that made the link between urban planning and literature. It is a fascinating intersection indeed, but it is so complex.
What can undergraduate students at Tufts do to become like you, who might also interested in the urban space discourse?
Although I don’t think there are any current English major students who are interested in that, there are definitely Environmental Studies students who are taking the environmental injustice angle, who want to learn about urban planning. So my one recommendation for them would be to take classes in the UEP program. A number of my students are either UEP minors or took a lot of UEP courses, so a good number of them had a pretty strong background on thinking about the space and planning.
What is the most rewarding aspect of your class and your research?
I really enjoy teaching about mapping stories of the city. So to get students to really understand the intersection between urban history and the theory of language and stories, I encourage them to get some hands-on perspectives by working in the field versus reading about it in the textbook. For teaching, the most rewarding part is the continued conversations with students. Hopefully, I would strike the fire among the members of the class and I can have really fascinating conversations about the changes that have taken place today. The rewarding aspect of research is having the luxury to read something in detail and better understand the initiatives. It is really rewarding because I don’t always get that time. If I was to have a full time job that is not related to my research interest, I would not have the time to go in depth in that issue.
What kind of internship are there that Tufts students can apply to gain those hands-on perspectives?
I definitely recommend working in an organization that you feel deeply connected to. It might not always be in the urban setting and it might be slightly different, like social welfare, but I feel like it definitely touches on urban health, how populations come together and what affects populations. For urban studies, community development corporations are really interesting and really fascinating places to learn more about development overall. But there are more than just those groups – there are many progressive organizations and community organizations that advocate for the right of minorities. These organizations don’t always specifically say that they are urban-oriented but they do a lot of things related to the urban space and the local communities. Centers that offer social services are also good places to look at, like their after school programs, English for adult learners and citizenship classes. So find a place where you are very interested in living, find out about what changes might be taking place, read local newspapers and get a sense of what is going on there—then look for organizations within that place.