Histories on the Run: State Memory & Hmong Refugee Ways of Knowing
A Conversation with Ma Vang & Kong Pha
East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul, MN 55106
Friday, March 28, 2025, 7:00 p.m.; doors, social and refreshments at 6:30
What does refugee history look like when government records try to keep state complicity in producing displacement a secret? How might Critical Hmong Studies help us to understand the forces of empire, war, place, and peoplehood more deeply? How are archives embodied and lived?
Join Professors Ma Vang (UC Merced, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies) and Kong Pha (UW-Madison, Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies) for a community discussion on Vang’s History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Duke, 2021) and Pha’s forthcoming Hyperheterosexual Subjects: Racialized Cultures of Gender and Sexuality in Hmong America (University of Washington Press, 2025).
Dr. Ma Vang is an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced. Her most recent book is History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Duke University Press, 2021). She is co-author of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (UC Press, 2022) and co-editor of Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). She teaches courses in critical race theory, critical refugee and immigration studies, and interdisciplinary humanities. She is actively involved in Merced community organizations in an advisory role on youth and education projects.
Dr. Kong Pheng Pha is Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He teaches courses on Hmong American experiences in the diaspora, Asian American feminism, and social justice organizing in the U.S. His book Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (
This event is free and open to the public. Complimentary snacks & refreshments will be available beforehand at 6:30.
Sponsored by Sociology and American Studies, Macalester College