Critical Pacific Islander Studies Fellowship
Arianna Lunow-Luke, Ethnic Studies, “From Carceral Spaces to Abundant Places: Restoring Waiwai in Kawailoa”
This project explores the layered histories and futures of Kawailoa, a historically fertile area in Kailua, Oʻahu now occupied by two of the State of Hawaiʻi’s primary correctional facilities. Once a thriving breadbasket of Kānaka Maoli, Kawailoa today exemplifies the violences of settler colonialism through the incarceration of Native peoples. While pre-existing scholarship has examined Kawailoa’s carceral legacy, little attention has been given to the historical and ongoing ways Kānaka have fostered relationships to the lands and waters of this area as a source of cultural, spiritual, and ecological abundance. Through creative nonfiction, archival research, and oral histories, this project seeks to imagine Kawailoa beyond colonial carcerality. Centering Kanaka perspectives and practices, it will trace the flow of water through Kawailoa, both physically and metaphorically, as a means of nourishing community, identity, and land. Conducted in collaboration with local historian Barbara Pope, this project contributes to broader movements for decolonization, Indigenous cultural revitalization, and transformative justice in Hawaiʻi. The resulting essay will be published in an anthology by Barbara Pope Book Design that will serve as a resource for restoring and re-storying Kawailoa as a site of healing and regeneration. Ultimately, this project promotes community-driven narratives that restore decolonial relationships to land and water. As a fifth-generation Chinese settler of Hawaiʻi who was born and raised in Kailua my entire life, this project is grounded in my own lived experiences and personal responsibilities as a non-Native person who views this place as home.
Critical Southeast Asian American Studies Fellowship
Dawny'all Heydari, Department of Ethnic Studies, “Filipino-SWANA Solidarities in Long Beach in the Aftermath of Genocide: Anakbayan, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and Transpacific Trade”
About 350,000 Filipino sailors constitute about 30% of shipworkers globally, including over 40% of shipworkers on international vessels. Ship workforces are highly stratified along racial and national lines, with Filipino workers disproportionately representing the bottom echelons of the occupational hierarchy. As the ocean shipping industry turns toward controversial, potentially volatile and polluting green hydrogen-derivative fuels as a reformist climate solution—in part as a product of my climate campaigning out of Long Beach, California for four years with Pacific Environment—questions of the meaning of this new technology for racialized vessel workforces and frontline communities across the transpacific remain understudied. My research remedies this gap through ethnography bringing together Anakbayan-Long Beach (Anakbayan- LB) with Palestinian Youth Movement-Los Angeles-Orange County-Inland Empire (PYM-LA-OC-IE).
Anakbayan-LB is the Long Beach, California chapter of the comprehensive national democratic mass organization of Filipino youth in the U.S., fighting against U.S. imperialism against the Philippines and exploitation of Filipino American workers. PYM-LA-OC-IE is part of a grassroots, transnational movement of young Palestinians in Palestine and in exile globally, with campaigns to stop the shipping industry’s export of weapons technology from the U.S. to Israel. Through a combined focus group and individual interviews, I will investigate the meaning of the shipping industry’s turn toward hydrogen-derivative fuel bunkering at the Port of Long Beach in relation to frontline environmental justice communities in Long Beach, Filipino shipworkers, and the weapons trade to militarized regions of U.S. empire in the SWANA region in the aftermath of Israel’s genocide of Gaza from 2023-2025.
Victoria Huynh, Ethnic Studies, “Criminalized Refuge: Southeast Asians in the Deportation Pipeline”
While dominant research and policies towards refugees have historically presented resettlement programs as the solution to crises of displacement, there has been little scholarly attention paid to another outcome of mass resettlement: the criminalization and deportation of refugees after their arrival. Extant literature has yet to address how incarceration, ICE detention, and the double punishment of deportation have impacted refugees who were once promised pathways to citizenship and belonging. Through ethnographic interviews, fieldwork, and archival materials, my dissertation studies the experiences of formerly incarcerated, post-war Southeast Asian refugees (from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) and organizers in California. I explore the racialized and gendered processes by which community members of the largest-ever resettlement project in U.S. history came to be entrapped in prisons and ICE detention centers, and the complexities of the grassroots movements they have formed in response. Although there is a growing body of scholarship on the criminalization of migrants (otherwise known as crimmigration studies), most studies tend to focus on migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and omit Asian American experiences entirely. Because of this gap, we lack a full understanding of how the overlapping processes of criminalization, post-war migration, and racialization operate writ large. Drawing from the fields of critical refugee studies, carceral studies, and the sociology of migration, I pose the following research questions: 1) how and why have Southeast Asian refugees become a criminalized and deportable population in the United States today? 2) How might refugee experiences with social precarity and racialized exclusion complicate and add to theorizations of criminalization and forced displacement writ large?
James Sun, Ethnic Studies, “Tracing the Sociopolitical History of Southeast Asian Farmers in Fresno, California”
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, waves of Southeast Asian refugees came to the U.S., many of whom took up livelihoods in agriculture. Not much literature has focused Hmong, Lao, Mien, and Cambodian people, let alone the integral nature of their farming to their communities, livelihoods, identities, and our economies. My research will document the transnational history of Southeast Asian agrarian diasporas in California. Collectively, more than 1300 Southeast Asian families on farms produced more than 21,000 tons of produce in Fresno County worth an estimated $25.7 million in 2019. On top of navigating a foreign soil and culture, they also face racial discrimination, climate change-induced environmental effects (e.g., wildfires, drought, rising temperatures), issues with land ownership, and language barriers. Through oral histories and archival research, I will elucidate the shifting dynamics of the Hmong agricultural economy within a different sociopolitical context, and the relationships among food, farmers, and markets in the U.S. economy.
Abednego Togas, Ethnic Studies, “An Archive and Ethnography of Indonesia’s 1998 Tragedy and Its Internal and Diasporic Afterlives”
The May 1998 Indonesia riots, known colloquially as the 1998 tragedy, were a pivotal moment in the nation’s history that led to the fall of President Suharto’s three-decade authoritarian regime. The 1998 tragedy led to two major outcomes: Indonesia’s shift to a neoliberal democracy and widespread anti-Chinese violence that drove many Chinese-Indonesians to flee. This project addresses a gap in scholarship on Indonesian and Indonesian American memory and imaginaries of the 1998 tragedy and its post-1998 afterlives by combining archival research and ethnographic inquiry. My work will engage with official U.S. federal archives and, conversely, transnational cultural productions from Indonesian nationals that confront the tragedy’s afterlives and censorship. I will also conduct ethnography with Chinese-Indonesian asylees in the U.S. to document how displacement and belonging are remembered and reimagined. Over its duration, this project will trace how 1998 exiles’ perspectives align or diverge from current national Indonesian political projects, situating Indonesia and its diaspora within global neoliberal formations. Ultimately, this project asks how a “postcolonial” nation-state like Indonesia, shaped by authoritarian legacies and subjected to global economic pressures, mediated its internal fractures through selective historical amnesia. It thereby demands a transnational study, one that investigates the resonance of political rupture across borders and generations. This project contributes to a larger inquiry into the shape and possibilities of a transnational and post-imperial Southeast Asian/American project and network.
Critical Pacific Islander and Southeast Asian American Studies Fellowship
Nathan Tilton, Anthropology, “Security is a Myth: Chamorro and Filipino Veterans and Team Tåsi on Guåhan”
This project investigates the lives of Chamorro and Filipino veterans on Guåhan/Guam by focusing on Team Tåsi, a community-based rowing collective that revitalizes ancestral canoe practices as forms of healing and resurgence. At the center of Team Tåsi’s work is the galaide’, a traditional Chamorro outrigger canoe historically used for fishing and coastal travel. The galaide’ resonates with the Philippine bangka, another outrigger canoe central to Filipino coastal life. Together, these vessels embody the Austronesian seafaring heritage that connects Chamorro and Filipino communities across the Pacific, highlighting a continuity of oceanic knowledge that endures despite centuries of colonial disruption. The name Team Tåsi is itself significant: in Chamorro, tåsi means “ocean.” The ocean has long been central to Chamorro and Filipino life as a space of sustenance, travel, and ancestral connection. By taking this name, the team affirms the ocean not only as a physical environment but also the core of the team. For veterans on Guåhan, many of whom face disabling conditions from military service and limited access to care, rowing the galaide’ offers an embodied practice of reconnection. The galaide’ becomes more than a vessel: it is a site of return to the ocean, reactivation of ancestral knowledge, and renewal of community ties. By engaging with Team Tåsi, veterans redefine “security” not through militarization but through cultural practice, environment, and community. This research advances Critical Pacific Islander, Southeast Asian American, and Critical Military Studies by foregrounding practices of survival and futurity in the face of militarized colonial ecologies.
Vo Ram Yoon, School of Education, “Segregating or Being Segregated: A Descriptive Analysis of Asian American School Enrollment Patterns in California”
Asian American communities have played a prominent role in national discourse on school segregation and educational opportunity, yet they remain largely absent from empirical studies on segregation patterns. This project examines the extent to which Asian students in California are racially and economically segregated from White, Black, and Hispanic students, challenging simplistic narratives of racial privilege or marginalization. While Asian students are described as being overrepresented in elite educational spaces, ethnic disaggregation reveals stark disparities in educational attainment. In California, over half of Taiwanese, Korean, and Chinese adults hold college degrees, compared to less than half of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong adults and under a quarter of Fijian, Samoan, and Tongan adults. This study will use two sources of data: the Segregation Explorer, which has been used to quantify how segregated White students are from students of color, and school enrollment data from the California Department of Education, which tracks Filipino and Pacific Islander student enrollment separately from Asian student enrollment. By employing a QuantCrit framework, I seek to interrogate how racialized geographies shape educational opportunity and identify patterns where AAPI students are segregated from Black and Brown communities, similarly to White students, as well as cases where they are segregated from White students. By being able to differentiate the experiences of Filipino and Pacific Islander students from those of the broader Asian student population, this study will contribute to a deeper understanding of educational inequities within the AAPI community and inform future school integration efforts that include AAPI experiences.
