Book Project
Bad Refugees: Manufacturing Statelessness at the Margins of the Global North
Taking a case-based approach to Orange County’s Little Saigon neighborhood as it emerged in the post-Fordist United States, Bad Refugees: Manufacturing Statelessness at the Margins of the Global North examines the entwined histories of Southern California and Southeast Asia as interrelated sites constituted by settler militarism and police violence. The book uses a transnational-social historical approach to trace a genealogy of the so-called Bad Refugee in culture-as-law, contextualizing how Orange County residents reacted to the mass arrival of Vietnamese refugees during a period of post-industrial decline as a ‘disorderly’ threat to suburban homogeneity and affluence. As the region became home to the largest diasporic Vietnamese community in the nation in just five years, several instances of refugee crime emerged as discursive flashpoints, animated by the law-and-order and ‘family values’ austerity politics of the Reagan years.
Reading these examples of refugee deviance from a critical legal perspective and tracing their formation across news coverage, congressional hearings, presidential speeches, and judicial opinions, Bad Refugees shows how these cases became consequential moments in negotiating the limits to liberal multiculturalism’s incorporation of racial others arriving during the post-civil rights and post-Hart-Cellar period. Particularities around Southeast Asian war displacement, refugee resettlement, and racialized criminalization shaped the “crimmigration” turn in migration governance, demonstrating how the convergence of mass incarceration and migrant criminalization in part hinged on constitutive innovations in local and federal responses to the emerging Southeast Asian ‘gang problem.’
Bad Refugees ultimately diverges from writings on the so-called “Good Refugee” to instead center “poorly-assimilated” so-called Bad Refugees as analytically primary. In tracing the colonial continuities and carceral afterlives of the wars in Southeast Asia as they have come to shape current deportation politics and technologies, the book elaborates on a framework—refugee racial capitalism—to make sense of the refugee as an ethical figure in the global economy from colonialism into the late capitalist present.
Papers Under Review
Codifying Criminality: POLICE DATABASES and the Rationalization of Surveillance from Colonial Vietnam to the Modern Carceral State
Tracing the early adoption of computer gang databases by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1980s to the deployment of computationally-assisted surveillance during the Vietnam War, this paper uses a genealogical approach to compare surveillance technologies developed across the arc of colonial racial capitalism—from the Age of Imperialism through the Cold War and into the historical present. Specifically analyzing technologies displayed at the 1902-03 Hanoi Exposition in French Indochina and the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair during the Cold War, it positions Southeast Asia is an important case because much of the primary architecture for the development of the modern American surveillance state historically arose from attempts to manage anti-imperial resistance across the decolonizing Pacific. The analysis connects how early anthropometric measurement and recordkeeping practices under French colonial rule transformed through the widespread adoption of computational tools for postwar technocratic planning during the American War in Vietnam, demonstrating a ‘rationalization of surveillance’ over time as economies of accumulation and disposal interacted with technological innovations in bureaucratic management to maximize means-end, state-market efficiencies. Ultimately the analysis shows how global interpellations of the locatable ‘criminal’ body in local, national, and international databases continue to constitute data itself as a rationalized—and increasingly automated—technology of imperial power.
The Refugee Carceral Condition under Racial Capitalism: Histories of Intra-Community Policing across French Indochina, Cold War Southeast Asia, and the U.S. Resettlement Contexts
Citing contemporary examples of Southeast Asian police officers that have emerged within the refugee diaspora, this essay traces a genealogy of “refugee cops” as they emerged vis-à-vis increased criminalization of growing Southeast Asian communities in the resettlement context. Locating their emergence from a deeper historical lineage of indigène officer cultivation across French Indochina and American Cold War intervention in the transpacific circuit between Southeast Asia and the United States, the genealogy weaves critical refugee studies’s accounts of the refugee as key to understanding international relations into a political economic arc across the timeline of racial capitalism to ultimately discuss what I term the refugee carceral condition. Southeast Asian cops, from this view, emerged from racial capitalism’s ongoing carceral reliance on confinement and the operation of sites that normalize “bare life” to securitize racialized space for the purposes of dispossession, exploitation, accumulation, and disposal. Closing by turning to the writings of Cedric Robinson and H. L. T. Quan to help imagine old and new refugee ways of living and being free beyond carceral imperialism, the essay ends by taking up the notion of preserving the ontological totality as has been elaborated in the Black Radical Tradition, considering how an embrace of refugee ontological wholeness might work to dematerialize and divest from the global prison-border apparatus.
Community-Engaged Research
Participatory Action Research with a Transformative Justice Program in Select CDCR Prisons
Multi-year, mixed methods study of a feminist curriculum currently being piloted in California state men’s prisons. Funded by a CDCR Innovative Programming Grant and overseen with two other principal investigators, this project is being done in collaboration with the transformative justice organization Success Stories, which centers community-based responses to interpersonal harm and peer-led facilitation.
PAST RESEARCH
My 2019 paper published in Demography, ‘Reexamining the Influence of Conditional Cash Transfers on Migration from a Gendered Lens,’ shows how popular cash-transfer welfare programs supported by the World Bank have curtailed women’s migration by conditioning receipt of benefits on the performance of feminized labor within the home. Drawing on the welfare state literature, the paper demonstrates how the welfarist international development regime works to discipline global subjects into proper laborers and families in ways that configure their bodies within the home and across national boundaries.
My work with Dr. Hedwig Lee on the opening chapter “#SayHerName: Why Black Women Matter in Sociology” published in The New Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives examines how both Anna Julia Cooper and Zora Neale Hurston became epistemologically erased as important alternative theorists in sociology and anthropology. In conversation with the growing Du Boisian intervention in sociology, the chapter takes a feminist standpoint to contemplate how our sociological ‘canon’ remains haunted by the erasure of their contributions.
I was lead author on the paper 'Family Obligation Attitudes, Gender, and Migration' published in the International Journal of Sociology in 2020. Finding that valuing parental caregiving intersects with migrants’ embeddedness in Nepal’s remittance economy, the study demonstrates how people attempt to negotiate the competing demands of labor migration and family caretaking by participating in proximate migrations that are less remunerative but geographically closer to home.
I also co-led authorship on another paper with Dr. Nathalie Williams titled 'When Does Social Capital Matter for Migration? A Study of Networks, Brokers, and Migrants in Nepal' published in International Migration Review in 2020. Engaging with theories on the influence of migrant networks on facilitating migration within communities of origin, the study elaborates on how social capital theories of migration fail to account for an increasingly dominant type of state-formalized migration facilitated by the booming migration brokerage industry.