Russell Jeung

Co-Founder of Stop AAPI Hate, Best-Selling Author & Professor at San Francisco State University

Russell Jeung

Co-Founder of Stop AAPI Hate, Best-Selling Author & Professor at San Francisco State University

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Biography

Dr. Russell Jeung is a nationally respected voice at the intersection of race, community safety, and social change, known for translating lived experience and data into movements that shift public consciousness and policy. His work has helped redefine how institutions, media, and communities understand and respond to anti-Asian racism in the United States. As co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, Dr. Jeung transformed a grassroots reporting effort into the nation’s leading movement and data source on anti-Asian discrimination, fundamentally changing public discourse, media narratives, and policy conversations. Under his leadership, Stop AAPI Hate elevated thousands of first-person accounts that had long been dismissed or overlooked, making visible the everyday realities faced by Asian American elders, women, immigrants, and workers, and positioning him as one of the country’s most trusted voices on the scale, patterns, and deeper systems driving anti-Asian hate.

Dr. Jeung is also the author of five influential books that have helped shape scholarly and public conversations around Asian American identity, faith, and activism. His work includes Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans, Moving Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies, and At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors, alongside Sustaining Faith Traditions and Faithful Generations. Across these works, Dr. Jeung blends rigorous research with deeply human storytelling, exploring how families, students, faith communities, and immigrants navigate displacement, resilience, belief, and belonging. Together, his writing establishes him as a leading interpreter of how cultural identity, social movements, and moral imagination shape both personal lives and public life.

Grounded in a commitment to community-engaged scholarship, Dr. Jeung has spent decades building partnerships that connect research to real-world impact. He has collaborated with organizations such as the Chinese Progressive Association, the Bhutanese Community of California, the Burma Refugee Family Network, NICOS Health Coalition, and the Community Youth Center, helping strengthen community voice across refugee resettlement, youth development, housing justice, and public health. He also co-produced the documentary The Oak Park Story, which chronicles a landmark housing lawsuit involving Cambodian and Latino tenants, further reflecting his long-standing focus on grassroots organizing, cross-community solidarity, and storytelling as tools for justice.

Dr. Jeung’s national leadership is grounded in deep academic training and a career dedicated to translating scholarship into action. Educated at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, he holds degrees in Human Biology, Education, and Sociology, and has served on the faculty of San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies Department for more than two decades. His blend of academic rigor, movement leadership, and community partnership has earned national recognition, including being named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people. Today, Dr. Jeung brings this unique combination of data, lived experience, and moral clarity to audiences, challenging institutions and communities to move beyond awareness toward accountability, solidarity, and sustained collective power.

Speaker Videos

Fighting Hate: San Francisco Professor Russell Jeung

Lessons From 50 Years of Asian American Studies

Speech Topics

Confronting Anti-Asian Hate: From Visibility to Collective Power

In this timely and deeply grounded keynote, Russell Jeung, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, traces how a grassroots community reporting effort grew into a national movement that reshaped how anti-Asian racism is understood in the United States. Drawing on thousands of first-person accounts, he reveals how everyday acts of hate—long dismissed or overlooked—exposed clear patterns tied to gender, age, immigration status, and economic vulnerability. Dr. Jeung goes beyond the data to show why storytelling, history, and moral imagination are essential to making numbers meaningful and driving lasting change. He also highlights the critical role of cross-racial solidarity and coalition-building in confronting systemic racism rather than treating hate as a series of isolated incidents. The talk closes with a powerful call to move from awareness to accountability and from momentary outrage to sustained collective action.

Audiences will learn:

How community-based data collection transformed the national conversation on anti-Asian hate.
Why anti-Asian racism is deeply interconnected with other forms of inequality and systemic harm.
What institutions, policymakers, and communities can do to build solidarity, accountability, and lasting collective power.