Who We Are

The Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC) is a group of interdisciplinary scholars who advocate for and envision a world where refugee rights are human rights. Committed to community-engaged scholarship, the Collective charts and builds the field of Critical Refugee Studies by centering refugee lives—and the creative and critical potentiality that such lives offer. Collective members not only study refugees, but many are also refugees themselves with long and deep ties to refugee communities in California and beyond.

Yến Lê Espiritu, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

Yến Lê Espiritu, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

Originally from Việt Nam, Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Espiritu has served as Department Chair, President of the Association of Asian American Studies, and Vice President of the Pacific Sociological Association. She also has extensive experience working with refugee and immigrant communities in San Diego. An award-winning author and a recipient of multiple grants, Espiritu has published extensively on Asian American communities, critical immigration and refugee studies, and U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia. A founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC), Espiritu is the co-author of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (University of California Press, 2022), written collaboratively by CRSC members.   

Lan Duong, Cinema and Media Studies, University of  Southern California

Lan Duong, Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California

Along with Yến Lê Espiritu, Lan Duong led a research group on Critical Refugee Studies at the University of California, Irvine in 2015 and is a co-founder of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. She is is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Temple University Press, 2012). Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines Vietnamese cinema from its inception to the present day. Her research interests include feminist film theory, postcolonial literature, and Asian/American film and literature. Duong’s critical works can be found in Signs, MELUS, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Amerasia, Asian Cinema, Discourse, Velvet Light Trap, and the anthologies, Transnational Feminism in Film and Media and Southeast Asian Cinema. She has coedited an award-winning anthology called Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders in Literature and Art (University of Washington Press, 2013). Duong is a coeditor of the Critical Refugee Book Series at UC Press and the Collective's website editor. Her newest book is a collection of poetry called Nothing Follows (DVAN and Texas Tech University Press, 2023).

Victor Bascara, Asian American Studies, UC Los Angeles

Victor Bascara, Asian American Studies, UC Los Angeles

Victor Bascara is an associate professor in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA, where he is also department chair.  He specializes in Asian American cultural politics and the critical study of colonial discourse.  He is the author of Model Minority Imperialism (Minnesota), and his writings have been published in journals such as American Literary History, American Quarterly, GLQ, American Literature, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, and the Asian American Law Journal, and in collections such as Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke U P), Imagining Our Americas:  Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke U P), Techno-Orientalism (Rutgers U P), The Imperial University (U Minnesota P) and East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (NYU).  He co-edited (with Lisa Namakura) a special issue of Amerasia Journal on “Asian American Cultural Politics Across Platforms” (2014) and (with Keith Camacho and Elizabeth DeLoughrey) a special issue of Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific on “Gender and Sexual Politics of Pacific Island Militarisation” (2015).

Fiori Berhane, Anthropology, University of Southern California

Fiori Berhane, Anthropology, University of Southern California

Fiori is an Assistant Professor in anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research interests span global Black studies, critical refugee and border studies, and the anthropology of Europe. Her current book project, Prisoners of Our Dreams, argues that the substance of current debates amongst Eritrean refugees of disparate political generations hinges upon an aborted or incomplete decolonization from Italian colonial rule, and that these discourses impact upon how the migration crisis in Europe is imagined and in turn what potential solutions could be enacted. Her work has been featured in Anthropology Now, Africa is a Country and Lavoro Culturale and has been supported by the Wenner Gren foundation, the Fulbright IIE and the American Academy in Rome. 

Anita Casavantes Bradford, Chicano/Latino Studies and History , University of California, Irvine

Anita Casavantes Bradford, Chicano/Latino Studies and History , University of California, Irvine

Anita Casavantes Bradford is an associate professor of Chicano/Latino Studies and History at UC Irvine, where she is also Co-Director of the UC-Cuba Multi Campus Academic Initiative. She earned her Ph.D. in 2011 in U.S. and Latina/o-Latin American History at UCSD. Her first book, The Revolution is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014; her second book, Suffer the Little Children: Unaccompanied Migrant Children and the Geopolitics of Compassion in Postwar America, is also from the UNC Press.  Her articles and essays appear in Diplomatic History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Latin American Research Review, American Historical Review, Cuban Studies, U.S. Catholic Historian, and the Journal of the Society for History of Children and Youth, among others, as well as in Perspectives on History, Inside Higher Ed Magazine, and the LA Review of Books. Her teaching focuses on comparative and transnational Latina/o history, Cuban and Cuban American history, the history of immigration, race and ethnicity, the history of childhood, and critical refugee studies. She also recently wrote and produced a musical, Refugee Songs: A Musical Journey, which debuted at UCSD’s Mandeville Auditorium on October 19th, 2019.

Nigel Hatton, Literature, UC Merced

Nigel Hatton, Literature, UC Merced

Nigel Hatton is an Associate professor of Literature and affiliate faculty in Philosophy at UC, Merced. His published work includes essays on the relationship of human rights and literature, and the literary and political ideas of writers and thinkers such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Søren Kierkegaard, Jose Marti, and Ivan Klima. His current book project examines Kierkegaard’s inter-textuality and philosophical relationship with and to 19th and 20th century African-American literature and culture. He is currently co-editing a special issue of LWU (Literatur in Wisseenschaft und Unterricht) that features scholarly articles on texts that address themes of migration or displacement of people due to war, persecution, natural catastrophe or economic collapse.

In 2015, he received a grant from the UC Consortium in Black Studies in California to complete a project titled, “African American Women and Ending Cultures of Homicide.” This project brings together over 20 years of reporting, interviews, and research and collaboration with activists, photographers, journalists and artists working in urban spaces within the United States to amplify the voices and agency of women who have lost children to homicide and had the loss of their children relegated to spectacle and silence rather than substantive action and social change. Throughout graduate school and during his faculty appointments, he has simultaneously taught courses in journalism, literature and writing in California State prisons. A proponent of education as a means to dismantle prisons one mind at a time, he is the prisoner advocate on the UC Merced Institutional Review Board committee (IRB). 

Lila Sharif, Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Lila Sharif, Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Lila Sharif is a creative writer, researcher, and assistant professor at Arizona State University's School of Social Transformation. Her research links themes of displacement and Indigenous cultural resurgence for Palestinians in the homeland and diaspora. Her current project is a book about the ways in which fair trade economies, settler colonialism, environmental destruction, and storytelling converge at Palestine's historic olive tree, which has been harvested by Palestinians for over 6,000 years. Through a transnational Palestinian Indigenous methodology that integrates food, land, and Palestinian cultural production, Sharif develops the concept of Vanishment as an Indigenous critique of capitalism and settler colonialism. 

Sharif researches and publishes on environmental justice, Indigenous epistemologies, Palestinian cultural production, and ethnic and racial studies. Recently Sharif co-edited a special issue of Amerasia on the topic of Critical Refugee Studies alongside Yen Le Espiritu, and co-authored the book Departures (UC Press, 2022), which charts the field of Critical Refugee Studies. She has a co-authored anthology forthcoming with Duke University Press entitled Detours: A Decolonial Guidebook to Historic Palestine, which reimagines a decolonial Palestine through the words and art of Palestinian scholars, artists, alternative tour guides, and allies. She is a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective as well as a founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. Sharif is the first Palestinian to earn a Ph.D. in ethnic studies, which she earned alongside a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC San Diego.

Khatharya Um, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley

Khatharya Um, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley

Professor Khatharya Um is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, and Program Coordinator of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies.  She is also affiliated faculty of Global Studies, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Berkeley Human Rights Center, and serves on the UC system-wide Faculty Advisory Board on Southeast Asia. She was a Chancellor Public Scholar.

Professor Um’s research and teaching center on Southeast Asian politics and societies, Southeast Asian diaspora, refugee communities, educational access, genocide, and the politics of memory. Her publications include recent books From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora (NYU Press, 2015) and Southeast Asian Migration: People on the Move in Search of Work, Refuge and Belonging (Sussex Academic Press, 2015).

Professor Um is also actively involved in community advocacy, principally on issues of refugees and educational equity.  She has served on numerous boards of directors, including as Board Chair of the leading Washington DC- based Southeast Asian Resource Action Center, and as President of the National Association for the Education and Advancement of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese Americans. She has received numerous awards, congressional recognitions, for her community leadership and service. 

Ma Vang, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Merced

Ma Vang, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Merced

Ma Vang is an Associate Professor and Chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Duke University Press, 2020). Her interdisciplinary research advances a refugee critique of secrets, national history, and knowledge production. She specializes in critical Hmong Studies to demonstrate how Hmong have been racialized through their history of involvement in the U.S. “secret war” in Laos. She is the co-editor of Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and her writings have been published in positions: asia critique and MELUS. She has received several awards including the Ford Dissertation Fellowship, the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the UC Multicampus Research grant to establish the Critical Refugee Studies consortium.

Mohamed Abumaye - Past Member (2016-2020), Department of Sociology, California State University, San Marcos

Mohamed Abumaye - Past Member (2016-2020), Department of Sociology, California State University, San Marcos

Mohamed Abumaye is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, San Marcos. His work centers on the intersections between military and police violence. He investigates the San Diego police department’s unit of counter-terrorism and U.S. military drone attacks in Somalia as the transnational circuits of violence that shape Somali refugee flight. What distinguishes his project from other works on police is that he focuses on the militarized aspects of policing, and does so with an emphasis on the refugee. He centers the role of Somali youth activists in exposing the relationship between U.S. militarism in Somalia and hyper-policing in City Heights, San Diego. Mohamed’s work interrogates City Heights as a translocal space by interweaving the fields of Black Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and Carceral Studies.

Christiane Assefa, Graduate Student Assistant, 2020-2022, Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

Christiane Assefa, Graduate Student Assistant, 2020-2022, Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

Christiane is the Graduate Assistant for the CRSC and a PhD Student in the Ethnic Studies program at UCSD. Her dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that traces the history of East African displacements to the United States and forms of knowledge production among Ethiopian and Eritrean refugee women. Her work is informed by her grassroots organizing work, experience as a child of refugees, and commitment to the stories the women in her community share. 

Mellissa Linton Villafranco, Graduate Student Assistant 2019-2020, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

Mellissa Linton Villafranco, Graduate Student Assistant 2019-2020, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

Dr. Mellissa Linton Villafranco (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies and is a part of the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her specializations include Reproductive Justice, Materialist Feminism, Central American and Critical Refugee Studies. Her research utilizes ethnography and cultural analyses of political texts to explore the root causes of the Central American caravan and queer kinship at the U.S./Mexico border. Prior to joining ASU, Dr. Villafranco received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego, where her work was supported by the Critical Refugee Studies Initiative.

Olivia Quintanilla, Graduate Student Assistant 2017-2019, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

Olivia Quintanilla, Graduate Student Assistant 2017-2019, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

Dr. Olivia Quintanilla recently defended  her dissertation entitled, “Inafa’ maolek: Restoring Balance through Resilience, Resistance, and Coral Reefs: A Study of Pacific Island Climate Justice and the Right to Nature,” in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Olivia’s family is from Guahan (Guam) and she’s used her academic opportunities as a Chamorro scholar to research the unique histories and futures of Pacific island life. She is interested in coral reef science and activism, climate justice, and the figure of the climate refugee. She currently serves on the board of directors for Chamorro Hands in Education Links Unity (CHE’LU), teaches history at Mesa Community College and is part of the San Diego Race and Oral History Project team. Dr. Quintanilla is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.  

Supporters

We have been generously supported by the University of California Office of the President Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives. Most recently, we have been awarded the Whiting Foundation Grant to develop our Refugee Teaching Institute at the University of California, Merced. A recent supporter is The Spencer Foundation for our work in education. Thank you to all of our supporters. 

University of California