Telling, Triggers, Trauma, and Retelling: Salience of Ethnicity for a Lao Refugee Scholar

• In Event: Equity-Focused Scholarship as Emancipatory and Liberatory Advocacy for Women of Color in Academia

Abstract

Purpose
In this paper, I highlight the process of becoming a community-engaged refugee scholar. I detail how my refugee migration story is explicitly interwoven with other Southeast Asian American (SEA) refugee narratives.

Perspective
In reflecting on my refugee experiences, I am acting as someone who has distinct characteristics of an auto-ethnographer as a “boundary- crosser” who also has a “dual identity” (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p. 3). My identity as a Lao American refugee shapes how I see the world and how I conduct my research. Similar to Anzaldua (2016), I am a turtle, wherever I go, I carry my “refugee” home on my back. My refugee home contains post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Methods & Data
I employed autoethnography to systematically analyze (graphy) my personal research experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno) (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). I am challenging the traditional ways of doing research and representing others (Spry, 2017) and treat my research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act (Adams & Holman Jones, 2018). I reflected on my article on 37 SEA youth's educational experiences in an urban high school. This article highlighted how these youth understood the salient role of ethnicity in their self-identification. I juxtaposed the youth’s ethnic identities to their white high school teachers’ racialized identities.

Findings
In the retelling, I am triggering and retriggering myself. But I also ascribe to Judith Herman’s (2015) argument that there is power in the retelling as I “reassemble an organized, detailed, verbal account, oriented in time and historical context” out of “fragmented components of frozen imagery and sensation” (p. 177). She posits that with the reconfiguration of my “obsessive mental processing of embedded traumatic scripts”, I am enacting a “ritual of healing” (p.181), one I wholeheartedly embrace. For my research participants, sharing my refugee background helps build rapport and trust as they discussed their racialized experiences with U.S. schools and staff members. I realized upon reflection that my experiences were mirrored in these 37 SEA youths. It became not just research but wesearch. I propose a new term “wesearch” because my research has always been about our collective stories. I have been honored and privileged to be on the receiving end of these powerful narratives from my Southeast Asians and feel that it is my responsibility to ensure that their stories are shared with the wider community.

Significance
In this article I disrupt the current discourse and single narrative of Asian students as a monolithic model minority. I advocate for teachers to examine their own ethnic identity and to learn more about their students’ intersectional identities in order to better serve them. It is only in doing so that we who study might seek liberation for both ourselves and those whose stories are being told.

Author

• Phitsamay Sychitkokhong Uy, University of Massachusetts - Lowell