Kong Pheng Pha, Rachel Kuo

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In Movement Media, Rachel Kuo assesses the possibilities and limitations of crafting solidarities across racialized differences through media-making processes and communications practices. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork, Kuo revisits key movements--Third World feminism, environmental justice, migrant justice, and police and prison abolition--to assess the mundane and less visible forms of movement building that help various groups navigate the politics of difference in theory and in practice. Kuo situates these movements alongside shifts in technological developments and the communication landscape, making the case that building and sustaining solidarity requires time and work to develop shared political analysis and practices.

As contemporary movements organize and struggle against the challenges of NGO-ization, neoliberal identity politics, private technologies, and liberal carceral reform--all of which seek to subsume and manage the efficacy of political organizing--Movement Media tells the important story of how communities build and sustain solidarity through media.

Rachel Kuo writes, teaches, and researches race, feminist politics, social movements, and digital technology. She is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2025) and co-editor of the anthology We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities (Haymarket Books, 2025). She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective. Her writing has a been published in Media, Culture, and Society, Political Communication, Social Media and Society, New Media and Society, and Journal of Communication. Her creative organizing projects, including zines, digital media work, and public scholarship, has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, NBC, NPR, and Teen Vogue.

About Queering the Hmong Diaspora: In the wake of the US wars in Southeast Asia, the arrival of Hmong refugees reignited American anxieties about race and sexuality. Sensationalized media portrayals of child marriages, bride kidnappings, and polygamy framed Hmong communities as sexually deviant, reinforcing a racialized perception of their cultural practices. In Queering the Hmong Diaspora, Kong Pheng Pha dismantles these narratives, revealing how legal cases, media representations, and legislative efforts have constructed Hmong Americans as hyperheterosexual and ungovernable subjects.

Critically examining how Hmong Americans are positioned within racial, gendered, and sexual discourses of liberalism, Pha explores the lived experiences of queer Hmong Americans, whose existence and activism challenge mainstream and ethnonationalist constructions of subjectivity. Addressing Hmong American gender and sexual politics through feminist, queer, and social justice lenses, Pha offers a critical framework for understanding how race and sexuality intersect in shaping the lives of minoritized refugee communities in the United States and beyond.

About Kong Pheng Pha: Kong Pheng Pha is assistant professor of gender and women's studies and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His book Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (University of Washington Press, 2025) analyzes Hmong racial subject formation and cultural transformations against the backdrop of U.S. sexual and queer liberalism. His current projects include a book of personal narrative nonfiction essays about Hmong's place in a revolutionary America, and a book on the visuality of invisibility, secrecy, and statelessness.