People-making Pedagogy: Refugee and Anti-imperialist Teaching

• In Event: Hmong Americans and Creative Placemaking in the Empire

Abstract

This paper will explore the pedagogical practices that negotiate imperialist- and capitalist-induced war, violence, and displacement. Drawing from scholarship that foregrounds pedagogy as a social relation, this paper connects pedagogy and placemaking to analyze how we can build anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist social relations that move toward people-making in ongoing forced displacements. It seeks to address the insufficient global political education to inform public action against ongoing colonialism, genocide, and wars that continue to displace people from all over the world and for refugees and immigrants to live and teach about the human condition. Reading the literary and cultural works of Mai Der Vang, Soul Vang and Ed Lee among others, this paper argues for people-making pedagogy as relational practices of making people–in refugees, immigrants, Black, and Indigenous communities–rather than making institutions. It imagines how we can make sense of our lives in this historical moment through and with each other.

Author

• Ma Vang, University of California Merced