Sơn Ca Lâm
Biography
Dr. Sơn Ca Lâm is a feminist scholar, teacher, and video ethnographer. Her work brings together the fields of Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, Geography, and Sociolinguistics. Her research focuses on refugee displacement and the ways people enact new diasporic placemaking practices to (re)make home.
Area of Expertise
Critical Refugee Studies | Human Geography | Vietnamese American Community Studies | Video Ethnography | Visual Research Methodology | Sociolinguistics & Language Politics | Forced Migration & Displacement Studies | Diasporic Placemaking
Degrees
PhD, Clark University, Geography
MA, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Applied Linguistics
BA, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Environmental Sciences & Comparative Ethnic Studies
Additional Information
Centralizing the experience of the Vietnamese American refugee diaspora, her book project, Có Duyên Gặp Lại: Making Home in Diasporic Time and Space draws on over 24 months of multi-sited bilingual video ethnographic fieldwork with post-1975 transnational Vietnamese refugee families to examine the temporality of displacement as people attempt to rebuild their lives in a sociocultural context where “no one has time.” Prior to returning to UMass Boston, she was an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College.