“Mamdani Mubarak!”: A/P/A Prospects in the Mayor’s Office

Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

When he is inaugurated in January 2026, Zohran Mamdani will become New York City’s first South Asian American and Muslim mayor. The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU is pleased to host a dialogue about the prospects opened with this historic election. Please join us for a discussion about the issues on which Mamdani campaigned, the coalition he built in New York City, and what his mayoralty might mean for Asian/Pacific/Americans locally and across the United States.

The program will begin with brief reflections from organizers Sumathy Kumar, Jagpreet Singh, Ritti Singh, Jay Wu, and others to be announced. Moderated by Professor Paula Chakravartty (NYU Department of Media, Culture and Communication), a robust discussion with the audience will follow.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required.

Accessibility note: This venue is accessible for wheelchair users. There are all gender restrooms. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu

Paula Chakravartty is James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. She has published widely. Her current research includes a forthcoming co-edited volume with Denise Ferreira da Silva titled “An Anti-Colonial Feminist Critique of Capital: A Contribution to the Critique of the Global Political Economy” with Duke University Press, and a manuscript in progress on Media as Economic Violence. Chakravartty is the Co-Director of the CRACS Co-Lab and the Editor of the journal Communication, Culture and Critique. She has been an active member of NYU’s Coalition for Fair Labor and the NYU Sanctuary Coalition. She is a current member of NYU’s Faculty and Staff  for Justice in Palestine and the incoming president of the NYU chapter of the AAUP.

Sumathy Kumar is the managing director of the NYS Tenant Bloc, an organization focused on building the power of tenants from their buildings to the ballot box. She has organized tenants across the state for the last eight years and served as co-chair of the NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America from 2020 to 2022. As co-chair, she helped found and lead the chapter’s Socialists in Office committee, organizing  endorsed elected officials like Zohran Mamdani into close partnership with the socialist movement.

Ritti Singh is the communications director for Housing Justice for All and the NYS Tenant Bloc. She spearheaded the communications strategy to win Good Cause Eviction, New York state’s largest expansion of tenant rights in five decades, and led the narrative work for the Freeze the Rent campaign, which organized over 20,000 tenant voters to elect Zohran Mamdani. Now based in Brooklyn, Singh was previously a tenant organizer in upstate New York with the City-Wide Tenant Union of Rochester. She has trained tenant leaders and organizers across the state in media strategy and storytelling, secured hundreds of press placements, mobilized thousands of digital supporters, and taught narrative strategy at City College of New York and Social Movement Technologies. She approaches communications as a form of organizing: making working class power undeniable, relentlessly inviting tenants into the fight, and building the belief that we can win.

Jay Wu is a policy strategist and organizer with the Democratic Socialists of America. As a former co-chair of NYC-DSA’s Build Public Renewables Campaign, he led member onboarding, legislative development, and grassroots mobilization. As a result of the campaign’s advocacy, New York State passed the Build Public Renewables Act in 2023, empowering the largest state public power organization in the country to build renewable energy and create thousands of union jobs. During his term as campaign co-chair, Wu also served as a multilingual field coordinator for Illapa Sairitupac’s Assembly campaign to represent District 65. In his professional capacity, Wu holds an MS in Urban Sustainability from the City College of New York and works at the intersection of climate and labor policy.

Image: “Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani @ Taxi Workers Alliance Rally @ City Hall” by InformedImages is licensed under CC BY 4.0.