SIG Event: Intersectionality and the Subject: Representation, Violence, and Liberal Human(itarian)ism: A Talk with Dr. Lina Chhun

Dr. Lina Chhun is a first-generation Cambodian American activist-scholar. Dr. Chhun was born in Khao-I-Dang, a refugee camp in Thailand and grew up in California. She is currently working on her book, Walking with the Ghost, which addresses questions of commemoration and vulnerability in the aftermath of violence. After completing her doctorate in Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Professor Chhun was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, in the Department of American Studies, and core faculty at the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Center for Asian American Studies. Dr. Chhun will address the significance of solidarity, particularly in humanizing the figure of the refugee. Engaging feminist critiques of liberal humanism, this talk explores the process through which the human is produced as subject. How does racial and gendered violence make and unmake subjects and determine not only which bodies matter, but which lives are legible and which subjects granted the full range of human complexity? How do historical and social relationships of gender, race, sexuality, and dis/ability produce differential rubrics of human value? And how do these relationships position us differently as subjects within history as well as a continually shifting present?

This event is made possible with support from the Association for Asian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the College of Liberal Arts Scholarly Intersections Grant Sponsored by the Departments of Asian & Asian American Studies, Anthropology, and American Studies.
For inquiries, please email Dr. Sophea Seng at Sophea.Seng@csulb.edu

Zoom: https://csulb.zoom.us/j/82996556041