About

Adria L. Imada is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, where she also teaches in the medical humanities program. Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, she currently resides on the homelands of the Acjachemen and Tongva people. Imada's scholarship focuses on cultural history and the intersections of disability, kinship, and medical incarceration. Her first book, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire, received significant recognition, including the 2013 Lawrence W. Levine Award for best cultural history from the Organization of American Historians. Her second book, An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration, explores the prolific visual culture surrounding kinship and disability. Imada's research has been supported by prestigious fellowships and grants, including the American Council of Learned Societies’ Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship and a National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine biomedicine grant. Her current project, "Surviving Epidemics: A Hidden History," investigates the diverse experiences of survivors of 20th-century epidemics in the United States and its colonies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Medicine
• Political Science
• Geography
• Gerontology
• Gender studies
• Law
• Family medicine
• Internal medicine
• Archaeology
• Psychiatry
• Genealogy
• Demography

Selected publications

• "The Potential That Was in All of Us": Carceral Disability and the Japanese American Redress Movement

  Women's studies quarterly · 2023-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The mass incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II has usually been assessed in terms of devastating economic and property losses, racist profiling, and the abrogation of constitutional rights. However, survivors also claimed incarceration as an experience of individual and collective disablement. In a break from decorum, survivors testified about a range of mental and physical disabilities at the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Hearings (CWRIC) held across the United States in 1981. This article discusses how a grassroots redress movement for government restitution brought the experiences of disabled, chronically ill, and mad people into the Commission hearings. Informed by 1960s-1970s Asian American and Third World Women's movements, intergenerational redress organizing transmitted and amplified the subjugated knowledge of disabled survivors. These efforts to involve ordinary people in redress produced an unanticipated yet profound record of what I call <i>carceral disability</i>: the aggregate disabling effects of mass incarceration and state violence. I further deliberate on the unresolvable ambiguities and ongoing anticarceral legacies of the Redress Movement.

  PublisherDOI

• Intimacies of Sound and Skin at Carville

  Southern cultures · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gerontology

  At the national leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, diverse groups of people diagnosed with leprosy or Hansen's disease (HD) forged an unexpected disability culture of music, touch, and recreation. In the 1970s, HD patients from the small Kalaupapa, Molokai, settlement in Hawai'i arrived at the vast Carville facility seeking advanced medical treatment. They interacted with other people medically sequestered in the US South, including African Americans, Latinos, whites, and recent immigrants. Some residents had benefited from a 1940s sulfone antibiotic cure, while others had a range of physical disabilities. These older adults also shared the experience of stigma, social exclusion, and separation from kin, although leprosy incarceration policies had been far harsher and enacted much earlier in Hawai'i than at Carville. Memoirs and snapshots produced by Hawai'i residents reveal how social encounters in the South influenced their life choices and institutional demands at a critical moment of transition and mobility for disabled people in the late twentieth century.

  PublisherDOI

• Family History as Disability History: Native Hawaiians Surviving Medical Incarceration

  Disability Studies Quarterly · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Demography
  • History

  No abstract available.

  PublisherDOI

• Four. Dreaming in Pictures queer kinship and subaltern family albums

  2022-02-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin

  2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • Genealogy
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin

  2022-02-01 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Two. A Criminal Archive of Skin

  2022-02-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 4. “Hula Queens” and “Cinderellas”: Imagined Intimacy in the Empire

  2020-10-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Lonely Together: Subaltern Family Albums and Kinship During Medical Incarceration

  Photography and Culture · 2018-06-19 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  During one of the longest and most extensive systems of medical incarceration in modern history (1866–1969), the Hawai‘i Board of Health exiled men, women, and children with leprosy (now known as Hansen’s disease) to a remote settlement on the island of Molokai. Some of these patients had access to cameras and the time to pursue photography, unlike most institutionalized and incarcerated people in the twentieth century. This article discusses subaltern family photographs produced by male patients during their decades-long exile from the 1930s to the 1990s. Patient-photographers crafted vernacular albums that reimagined non-normative, a-filial kinship in the absence of family connectedness and biological reproduction. Facing death and displacement, photographers envisioned uncertain futures suffused with anticipation, loss, and loneliness. While family albums are archival practices usually associated with women, unpartnered men took up the labor of piecing together affective relationships with chosen intimates. I further consider how patients developed anti-spectacular visual practices to represent heterogeneous bodies with disabilities, including their own, in consumer snapshots.

  PublisherDOI

• Promiscuous Signification

  Representations · 2017-01-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay assesses clinical photographs of leprosy patients created by the Hawai‘i Board of Health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or what may be the most extensive visual cataloging of indigenous, Asian, and immigrant bodies in America’s Pacific empire. Building on theoretical and methodological approaches to archives as a process rather than a source, I follow the trail of these clinical images through time and space, from their emergence within a photographic practice of medical management and segregation in Hawai‘i to their prolific circulation in transnational political and medical arenas. Offering spectacular evidence of the racialized and sexualized pathology of colonial peoples, these photographs were tightly regulated but increasingly viewed as clinical erotica after the United States incorporated Hawai‘i as a territory in 1900. The essay further suggests the “affective excess” that can disrupt the photograph’s medical surveillance, as social intimacies and care between Hawaiian patients bloom within the frame.

  PublisherDOI

Education

• B.A., American Studies

  Yale University

• M.A., Culture and Media

  New York University

• Ph.D., American Studies

  New York University

Awards & honors

• Andrew Carnegie Fellow, 2021
• National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine,…
• American Council for Learned Societies, Frederick Burkhardt…
• University of California, Faculty Research Fellowship in the…
• Huntington Library, Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship (20…