ONLINE: Centering Hmong Lives: The Pursuit of Academic Research and Its Role in Strengthening Ethnic Identity

media release: Madison College Hmong & Allies Affinity group in collaboration with the Office of Equity, Inclusion and Community Engagement, invites you to join our event on May 20 to celebrate Hmong American Day.

Centering Hmong Lives: The Pursuit of Academic Research and Its Role in Strengthening Ethnic Identity

As a college student in the early 1990s, historian Chia Youyee Vang preferred to learn about Western civilization and the thinkers that continue to influence society today. These had all seemed much more worthwhile to investigate largely because they were readily available in academic spaces. Learning about her people's history was not an option at the time. Since 2008, however, she has published many articles and five books on Hmong related topics. In this talk, Professor Vang will discuss the turning points in her personal and professional life that influenced her decision to study Hmong refugees dispersed across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. She demonstrates how researching and writing about her people’s displacement across the globe enables their voices to be heard. Facilitating the transformation of their marginal positions to the center of knowledge production has given her life greater purpose. She tells their stories because they are also her story.

This event is brought you by the Hmong and Allies Affinity Group at Madison College and the Office of Equity, Inclusion and Community Engagement at Madison College.

ATTENDEE LINK

BIO:

Chia Youyee Vang is Interim Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer and Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She oversees the Division of Global Inclusion and Engagement that is responsible for advancing diversity and equity and fostering inclusion for all members of the campus community. Her teaching and research interests include the Cold War in Asia, Asian American history, Hmong history, refugee migration and transnational and diasporic communities. Dr. Vang’s research is global in scope but intimately informed by her own refugee experiences as a child. She is interested in not only understanding larger political and military transformations, but also, the lived experiences of those who experience wars not of their own making but fought in their environments. Her documentation of Southeast Asian refugee lives and that of their descendants across four continents help us to better understand the lasting impact of one of the most controversial wars of the 20th century. In addition to publishing many articles on Hmong/Southeast Asian refugees/Americans, she is author of four books: Prisoner of Wars: A Hmong Fighter Pilot’s Story of Escaping Death and Confronting Life (Temple University Press, 2020), Fly Until You Die: An Oral History of Hmong Pilots in the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2019), Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2010), and Hmong in Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008). In March 2016, the University of Minnesota Press released her co-edited volume (with Faith Nibbs and Ma Vang), Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women. She is currently writing a new book entitled, The Sorrow of Displacement: Southeast Asian Identity and (Be)longing in the Global South, that examines the social and cultural history of Southeast Asian refugees resettled in French Guiana and Argentina in the late 1970s amidst much local protests.