In the driver's seat
Undergrad Mina Shin noticed something unusual in the children's books of Leo Politi. "In the background, there are wrecking balls that are destroying these old houses," she says. "There are freeways being built."
She found it curious how the author and illustrator could be political in his messaging without being overtly so. Though they're not yet fully engaged with society, she says, kids are not immune to the larger forces that shape our world. "Children's books are a source for them to navigate those feelings and thoughts."
It sparked an honors research project on children's books as radical political texts. "I'm looking into his books and seeing how they kind of politicize emotions such as anger and melancholia," says Shin.
Politi's books resonated with Shin in part because she is a child of immigrants who found their home in Los Angeles, where some of his books are set. Shin's parents are Zainichi Korean, a community of ethnic Koreans who have had a long history in Japan after being brought there due to World War II. Shin's parents were both born in Japan to Korean immigrants, but the family moved to the U.S. and back repeatedly, and Shin is proud to claim that she was born and raised in L.A. In academia, she says, she hopes to "provide fidelity and some sort of loyalty to Los Angeles and also my heritage as a Zainichi Korean."
At UC Irvine, where she entered as a political science major in 2022, she found a mentor in Long Bui, a professor of global and international studies with whom Shin participated in what's now known as the Summer Program in Research & Leadership (SPIRL). "I felt very seen by him, especially given our similar-ish upbringings of being both low-income, first-generation Asian-American students in social science. I really enjoyed talking to him and learning a lot about how to be more confident as an academic."
Race has been a throughline for much of Shin's extensive extracurricular work at UCI. Since 2024, she's worked as a student assistant and lead intern for the Center for Racial Justice (CRJ), co-directed by Teresa Neighbors, who also directs the Empathy, Connection and Human Outreach (ECHO) Project and Shared Table Perspective (STP) in the School of Social Sciences. "She has been someone that has really looked after me during my entire academic career, and I owe a lot to her for the opportunities that I've had," says Shin.
For CRJ, Shin has organized and given speeches at multiple on-campus events featuring civil rights activists, such as a visit from the late Lynda Blackmon Lowery, who was one the youngest protestors at the famous March 7, 1965 civil rights march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
Shin also had the opportunity to create an exhibit on campus at Langson Library commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Delano grape strike. Focusing on the unsung heroes of the California-wide movement — Filipino farmworkers as well as women and children who were involved — the photos, letter, flyers, VHS tapes, and other ephemera illustrate the strike's connection to subsequent movements and to present-day protestors, particularly students.
During her second year, Shin began participating in the ECHO project, formerly called the Diversity, Inclusion, and Racial Healing Ambassador Program (DIRHA), as well as STP, formerly known as the Deconstructing Diversity Initiative (DDI). The former, which entails working with local high school students to develop small-scale community projects focused on key aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion, provided helpful perspective for her honors research. "It was really fun to be able to talk to high school students and get to see what it's like to be a high schooler, to be a young student within this current climate, and being able to talk them through certain feelings that they're going through: certain worries, anxieties about the political and social state."
The latter initiative, STP, is an immersive, experiential learning program. The group traveled through places in the U.S. that have importance in the history of racial equity: San Francisco; New Orleans; Montgomery, Alabama. "Through that trip we got to go to a lot of different museums that were beautifully curated, and I think that got me really interested in archiving and museum practices as a whole."
After graduating in June, she'll be going on another experiential learning trip, this time to France and Germany to learn about post-reconciliation history with her thesis professor, Daniel Brunstetter, whom she met taking a French Enlightenment class two years ago. "He's one of the greatest mentors that I've had at UCI," she says. "I love the way he taught and how involved he was in what he was teaching and what he was sharing with us. He really cared about other people getting it and wanted to teach in multiple ways so everyone in the class could understand, and I feel like that made the class dynamic amazing."
In September, after she returns from that trip, she'll be starting a two-year master's in library sciences at San José State, with a focus on archival works.
"I would love to work at a museum. I would love to be a curator," she says. People working in that capacity hold a lot of power and responsibility, Shin says, and she envisions bringing a more collaborative, non-Western approach to curation.
"When you go inside a museum, you don't really think about the curation that often — you kind of take everything in at face value, but I don't think people realize that there's a lot of messaging behind how things are positioned within museums." To her, too much museum editorialization tells people what to think instead of encouraging them to wander, metaphorically, and leave with more questions than they arrived with. "I personally feel like it's the curator's job to continuously activate visitors' minds and visitors' curiosity, instead of just showing them, like, here this is, and you should think of this specific piece in this way."
In the long term, she wants to continue researching, and perhaps even be a professor. For now, she's excited to venture into something new. She's going to miss her professors from UCI, as well as the social spontaneity that the campus provides, an environment that fosters connections. She's learned to take advantage of that during her years here.
"UCI really does provide that opportunity to do whatever you want and make this school fit your needs and interests," she says. She found it eye-opening to learn how much agency she has.
"A lot of the time, especially when you're first generation and you're very unfamiliar with the world, you try to fit in with the space. The main thing that I really loved that I learned from UCI is that I can adhere any space to fit me. I realized at UCI that I have free will, and that's something that I really enjoyed and will cherish."
-Alison Van Houten for UCI Social Sciences
-photo by Luis Fonseca, UCI Social Sciences