For Safety and Solidarity: East and Southeast Asian Diasporic Political Mobilizations in Times of Crisis

The covid-19 pandemic laid bare a series of compounding crises, including underfunded healthcare systems, labour precarity, and global regimes of anti-Blackness. Against this backdrop, Asian diasporic communities faced specific, heightened pressures. Cast as vectors of disease and foreign agents by reactionaries and conservative elites, East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) people became hyper-visible in public space and targets of racial violence. This period of heightened vulnerability spurred a range of responses across diasporic communities. In the UK, community organisers coalesced around the acronym “ESEA” as a way of advancing political demands on behalf of an often-invisibilised group within the country.

While “Asian,” in the UK context, had typically served as shorthand for South Asians and “British Chinese” excluded many of those experiencing heightened racial violence, “ESEA” emerged as a useful alternative (Yeh, 2021). The term, which has been in circulation for a decade, was brought to the fore by online activist collectives raising awareness of anti-ESEA violence and subsequently embraced by long-standing community organisations. For instance, newly-formed groups like Voice ESEA undertook data collection in 2020 through Freedom of Information requests to create a catalogue of anti-ESEA violence in the UK (Voice ESEA, 2024). Meanwhile, in March 2024, Hackney Chinese Community Services, which has had a presence in East London since 1985, announced its rebranding as “ESEACC”: East and Southeast Asian Community Centre (HackneyChinese, 2024).

This conference presentation draws on interviews with community organisers and a digital ethnography of popular Instagram accounts, to map the terrain of ESEA political activism in the UK. The presentation will highlight recurrent demands of ESEA community groups—online and off—while identifying areas of tension within this heterogeneous coalition. More broadly, it will document a contemporary process of digitally-mediated racial formation and the emergence of a racial “category in the making” (Public Data Lab, 2024).