Ma Vang is an Assistant Professor and founding chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. She is currently working on a book that examines how secrecy structures both official knowledge and refugee epistemologies about militarism and forced migration. She is the co-editor of Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and her writings have been published in positions: asia critiqueand MELUS. With a UC Multicampus Research grant, she is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, which aims to ethically reconceptualize refugee lifeworlds to make apparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement. She serves as co-editor of its website, which hosts the refugee archive and story map platforms for refugees to share stories. She is also actively engaged with community organizations such as the Southeast Asian American Professionals Association.
