Victoria Hyunh | Criminalized Survivors and the Feminist Work of Fighting Deportation

The Global Studies in Migration and Diaspora Research Workshop is excited to announce that the second Winter quarter meeting will feature Victoria Huynh, a PhD candidate in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley. 

Join us for a presentation titled, "Criminalized survivors and the feminist work of fighting deportation." 

The research paper will be circulated beforehand. Food and refreshments will be provided at this event. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A and an open discussion. 

Abstract: Situated in critical migration and refugee studies, alongside a lineage of anti-carceral feminist organizing, this article in progress examines the participatory defense campaign of Ny Nourn, a Cambodian-American refugee and survivor of domestic violence who was incarcerated, then detained to await deportation to the country her family once fled. Ny’s life as both refugee and survivor complicates the assumption that she had been rescued via resettlement to the United States, a process which instead entrapped her within the intimate violence of abuse and the structural violence of the criminal legal system. Yet in over 16 years of incarceration and detention alongside other survivors, Ny also built the organizing strategies to fight for her freedom from deportation. The article asks: how might a framework of survival—or one’s lived experiences with gender-based violence—enrich our understandings of immigrant and refugee captivity, and of carceral punishment? How can survival become a political foundation with which to challenge our punitive immigration system? 

About the Speaker 

Victoria Huynh is a PhD candidate in the Ethnic Studies department at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation centers the criminalized deportations of Southeast Asian refugees and ensuing social movements to interrupt cycles of displacement and captivity.