Pitzer College Archives

Enoch Kim is a recent graduate from Pitzer College, a member of the Claremont Colleges Consortium. He majored in political science and international affairs, focusing on the political economy of Asia and the Middle East. Hailing from Illinois, he spent his formative years rooted in Korean-American activism.

Enoch has written for various newspapers on campus, such as The Student Life and Claremont Undercurrents, where he reported on labor organizing, student protests, and on-campus movements. He was also a delegate, training manager, and vice president of Pomona College’s Model UN (MUN), where he competed in conferences across the United States, earning accolades such as Outstanding Delegate for his four-day performance in the AI warfare policy committee for the Harvard National MUN 2024. He has also worked with Welcome to Chinatown, a community-based nonprofit focused on combating gentrification and preserving immigrant culture in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Besides, he has worked as a DEI and government affairs intern at Ingredion, a Fortune 500 company in global food solutions. Presently, he is volunteering for the campaign of Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive congressional candidate for IL-9. Enoch is passionate about protecting the rights of the marginalized and combating authoritarians, at home and abroad.

Enoch’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the economic and environmental impacts of the rising fast fashion industry in Tirupur, Mumbai, Lucknow, and Delhi. He is particularly focusing on the fast fashion brand Shein that represents a global consumption pattern toward synthetic textiles, in contrast to the domestic consumption pattern, which is more geared toward the natural textiles produced by small businesses. He is also exploring a circular economy framework to find ways for small businesses to improve their business using their competitive advantage of higher environmental sustainability. Enoch’s project aims to create a holistic picture of the Indian textile ecosystem in order to create pathways for MSMEs to survive and evolve in this era of globalization.

Neha Basu, a Rhode Island native, graduated from Pitzer College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology. Her honors-level senior thesis was called “The Collection Being More than the Sum of the Parts: The Role of Identity Integration and Racialization in Multiracial Students’ Experiences”, for which she conducted a survey and interviews with multiracial college students. Neha has served as a student representative on the Faculty Executive Committee as a fellow at the Writing Center. In 2023, she was fortunate to collaborate with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice in street vending research and policy advocacy, which sparked her interest in global street vending regulation as an intersection of various social and political factors. She has received the Kallick Community Service Award in recognition of her work in this area. In the future, Neha plans to attend law school, with the goal of becoming a movement attorney.

Street food vendors are a key part of urban life in India, yet they are excluded from the formal economy and often face restrictive regulations, making vending an interstice of sociopolitical, economic, and legal forces. These come together for street vendors in Kolkata, where such vending falls within the jurisdiction of two recently passed national- and state-level laws designed to regulate the practice. Neha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is utilizing a participatory action methodology to investigate the nature of Kolkata vendors’ interactions and navigations in terms of the law, what the local vending landscape reveals about conceptions of public space, and what it reveals about culture and economic factors.