Programs

Transtrauma: Conceptualizing the Lived Experiences of Vietnamese American Youth

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Dr. Khánh Lê’s talk draws from his doctoral project with Vietnamese American youth in the Philadelphia area. During Fall 2020, the youth participated in eight workshops to learn about their Vietnamese history, culture and language, as well as their history in the U.S. The eight workshops utilized the arts and storytelling to guide the youth to collectively narrate their experiences living in the diaspora. The careful examination of the youth’s narratives during the workshops helped him develop a theory of what he called “transtrauma.”

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Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA

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In Refusing Death, Nadia Y. Kim tells the stories of Asian and undocumented Latin@ immigrant women, finding that they are influential because of their ability to remap politics, community, and citizenship in the face of the country’s nativist racism and system of class injustice, defined not just by disproportionate environmental pollution but also by neglected schools, surveillance and deportation, and political marginalization.

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Maneuvering Mixedness: Interpreting Dougla in the Caribbean Diaspora

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The Dougla experience in Caribbean spaces and the diaspora provides an epistemology of mixedness, particularly as situated within an Indian/ African binary. Prof. Aleah N. Ranjitsingh centers maneuvering as a descriptive and explanatory tool that summarizes how Douglas contemplate their experience of mixedness outside of Caribbean homeland spaces—maneuvering defaults (Blackness), maneuvering ambiguity, and maneuvering privilege.

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The Border Within: Vietnamese Migrants Transforming Ethnic Nationalism in Berlin

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“The Border Within” paints a vivid portrait of these disparate Vietnamese migrants’ encounters with each other in the post-socialist city of Berlin. This book uncovers how 20th-century state formation and international migration—together, border crossings—generate enduring migrant classifications. In doing so, border crossings fracture shared ethnic, national, and religious identities in enduring ways.

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