Keynote Address: “Teaching (from) the Archives”
Ma Vang, Associate Professor of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Merced
This talk will highlight insights about archival encounters as practices of study, teaching, and life-making. It will show how the archive as a site of colonial knowledge-making and governance is also highly teachable. Tracing the connections between the archive and teaching will open up an understanding of how the teachability of certain tropes, narratives, and objects reflects the archive’s governance of life-making institutions like education and medicine. In addition, it will show how community teaching engages life lived in the moment.
About Ma Vang
Ma Vang is an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. Her book, History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Duke University Press, 2021), examines how secrecy structures both official knowledge and refugee epistemologies about militarism and forced migration. 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), and her writings have been published in positions: asia critique, MELUS, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, and Amerasia Journal. Vang has two collaborative public humanities projects, Refugee Teaching Institute and Asylum for the Arts, which engages with Central Valley communities to tell refugee and immigrant stories for education, arts, and literature. Vang has received several awards to support her research, including the UC Multicampus Research collaborative grant and the Whiting Foundation Public Engagement grant. She serves as co-editor of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective book series with the University of California Press.