How exactly did we make a podcast from scratch during quarantine? The FOTV team shares candidly about our grassroots project as we look forward to the holiday season and a continuation of Asian American perspectives.   Listen to Kaitlyn, Ava, Jessica, Julia, and Kenna reflect on the motivations, both personal and political, that turned into Fresh Off the Vote. 

What did we learn about ourselves in making Fresh Off the Vote? What are our coffee preferences, if any? Who are the people behind our audio quality and how do we make sure it's consistently top-notch? And what the heck is going on with Georgia's politics right now? 

Join us as we process our learnings and discoveries out loud. We are determined to keep at our individual journeys of civic engagement through this labor of love! 

Yup, we’re pissed about Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. We ended up with an aggressively conservative Supreme Court with a 6-3 supermajority that doesn't reflect the political makeup of this country and was appointed by a president who lost the popular vote. This is minority rule. But, Supreme Court headlines aside, many of us don’t really understand the court systems leading up to the highest court in the land. According to Ballotpedia, there are a total of 278 state appellate court seats up for election in 2020. What does that even mean? It’s too bad Law and Order didn't prepare us well enough.

In this episode, Jessica and Julia invite John Wang, a housing judge running for a civil court judge seat in New York City’s lower Manhattan, and Jerry Vattamala, an Asian American voting rights advocate from the non-profit Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), to give us a crash course on the judiciary. What are the differences between a district court and an appellate court? What makes a good judge? How do we understand the complicated dynamics between politics and judicial decisions, evaluate judges on our ballots, and beyond? 

In this episode of #FOTV,  Grace hosts a roundtable with a Race and Ethnic Studies graduate student and two undocumented immigrants. They examine lived experiences to see how race and law work together to erase Asian Americans from the undocumented narrative. Complicating and untangling the notion of "legal immigration", they ask the audience members to find local ways to listen to immigrant stories in their own zip codes and act as co-conspirators - more than allies. 

Rose Ann E. Gutierrez, a PhD student in the Social Sciences and Comparative Education division specializing in Race and Ethnic Studies at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Denise Panaligan is an undocumented immigrant born in the Philippines and raised in Koreatown, Los Angeles. Tony Zhu was born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras as the son of Chinese immigrants who came to the United States when he was six years old.