"Between Refuge and Refuse: Rethinking Refugee Environments"

How might we understand the multiple resonances of refuge environments for displaced human refugees and endangered species, as well as their entanglements and refusals? This panel features the coeditors of a forthcoming special issue of Amerasia Journal on "Between Refuge and Refuse: New Mediums/Methods for Theorizing Refuge(e) Environments." While refuge and refugees have been configured through militarized logics of rescue and made knowable through dominant media forms and carceral technologies, we explore a more expansive definition of refuge that centers questions of solidarity and self-determination from the multiple perspectives of the displaced.

The panelists will discuss our responses to the Tiffany Chung exhibit Indelible Traces (on view at the UCSB ADA Museum), the genesis of the special issue on refuge/refuse, and our questions and reflections on framing new directions for the intersections of critical refugee studies, environmental studies, and Indigenous studies.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA (Tovaangar). She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022), which was awarded the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize in History. She is also co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023).

Emily Hue is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies and core faculty in Southeast Asian Text, Ritual and Performance (SEATRiP) at UC Riverside. She is the author of Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora (U.Washington Press, 2025).

Heidi Amin-Hong is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book project in progress, “Transpacific Contaminations: Cold War Afterlives and the Aesthetics of Remediation” reimagines enduring Cold War environmental legacies through Asian American aesthetic interventions that seek to repair and reinvigorate human-nonhuman relations.

Moderator: Hương Ngô has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art & Technology Studies, was a Whitney Independent Study Fellow, a Fulbright U.S. Scholar and is currently a lecturer in the art department here at UCSB. Her work traces the entanglement of colonial histories, migration, the environment, and labor while imagining new futures from their fragments.

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