Michael Schulze-Oechtering (he/him/his)

Michael Schulze-Oechtering is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies in Fairhaven College at Western Washington University (WWU).  For the 2019-2020 academic year, he will be joining the University of Washington's (UW) Department of History as a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow.  Prior to Michael's faculty appointment at WWU, he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  His research uses social movement history and Comparative Ethnic Studies to explore how communities of color in the United States have both questioned and crossed racial boundaries.  He is the author of “The Alaska Cannery Workers Association and the Ebbs and Flows of Struggle: Manong Knowledge, Blues Epistemology, and Racial Cross-Fertilization,” which was published in the Amerasia Journal.  Moreover, he has forthcoming publications in two edited volumes on Filipino American Studies, Filipino American Transnational Activism: Diasporic Politics In The Second Generation and Filipinx American Studies: A Critical Registry of Terms.   During his postdoctoral tenure within the UW History Department, he will be completing his current book manuscript, No Separate Peace: Multiracial Struggles Against Racial Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest.  This study examines the parallel and overlapping activist traditions and grassroots organizing practices of Filipino cannery workers in Alaska and Black construction workers in Seattle between the 1970s and the early 2000s. His teaching interests include critical/comparative ethnic studies, anti-racist social movements, histories of capitalism, Asian American/Native Pacific Studies, and the Black Radical Tradition.