Academic Work

My dissertation, “Disrupting Notions of Refugeehood,” emphasizes the nuanced global processes that compel Vietnamese refugee resettlement through intersecting and constitutive factors of race, class, and gender. In order to interrogate the circumstances and policies that have shaped such migration, beginning in the Vietnam War and continuing to the contemporary moment, my work analyzes the migrant/refugee figure as a politicized embodiment of the construction of citizenship and borders, while also attending to how nation-states and global dynamics produce such political boundaries.

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Yet my work furthermore sheds light onto the complexity of migration categories themselves and how they serve as political containers. The Vietnamese refugees I examine at times reject the “refugee” classification or deliberately seek it, yet fail to have the state recognize them as such. By highlighting the voices and narratives of how diverse Vietnamese diasporic groups contend with their resettlement globally, I hope to disrupt normative conventions of migratory classifications and their temporal attachment by emphasizing the nuanced lived experiences of disparate Vietnamese communities.