Jennifer Huynh didn't see herself in history until college, when she read the book Growing Up Vietnamese American. Now, she’s writing herself, her community, and her research into history.

Huynh, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of American Studies, has won a Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grant that will fund research for her second book project, “Unsettling Refugees: Southeast Asian Deportation and the Carceral State.”

The Pipeline Grants Competition, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, supports early career social sciences scholars from diverse backgrounds. The competition seeks out research that examines how people navigate systemic barriers to economic mobility and success.

It’s a perfect fit for Huynh’s scholarly work.

“Unsettling Refugees” will fill a gap in immigration research by giving voice to Southeast Asian refugees who live in immigration limbo. She hopes her book will contribute to multiple fields, including sociology, criminology, refugee studies, and Asian American studies.

“I was so ecstatic and excited about the award, especially since April commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam,” Huynh said. “This research tells another interpretation of war and the afterlives of war from the people who experience it and their children.”

Close to home

The topic of her research is a personal one for Huynh, whose father fought alongside Americans in the Vietnam War and was imprisoned in a reeducation camp, then fled the country by boat. Like many other Vietnamese refugees, Huynh’s father settled and raised his family in Southern California.

Huynh grew up in a large Vietnamese community, which inspired her first book, Suburban Refugees: Class and Resistance In Little Saigon (University of California, 2025). She describes the book as a mix of memoir and scholarship, and while working on the last chapter, Huynh interviewed Vietnamese refugees who were living in the U.S. under deportation orders but were unable to be deported.

She realized there was very little scholarship on and awareness of this group — a gap she partially attributes to the “model minority myth.”

“A lot of times, Asian Americans are just seen as this model minority, high-achieving — even Vietnamese are seen as highly educated and successful,” Huynh said. “But in reality, there’s a lot of our community members that are experiencing housing and economic insecurity and instability.”

Hmong, Laotian, and Cambodian communities are especially underrepresented. They make up a small population in the U.S., and their stories are often not represented in America’s history, Huynh said.

For her book, Huynh plans to expand beyond her Vietnamese community in Southern California to explore the experiences of Southeast Asians across the U.S. Most existing research on Asian Americans focuses on the West Coast, with nearly a third of the population living in California alone, but Huynh says research needs to look elsewhere in order to more fully understand Asian American experiences.

The opportunity to deeply examine important issues and increase representation is why Huynh entered the field of Asian American studies earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.

“I don’t feel like my stories or my people’s stories or the U.S. war in Vietnam were well represented in my K-12 education,” she said. “So it wasn’t until I went to college and took a sociology class that I saw that I could be part of history.”

Living in immigration limbo

An additional obstacle for Huynh’s research — and understanding Southeast Asian stories as a whole — is the widespread belief that refugees are grateful beneficiaries of the U.S. resettlement program.

“This is a false narrative,” Huynh said.

In reality, Vietnamese refugees are not immune to the issues faced by other immigrant populations, including deportation.

Deportation is a different process for different countries; at times, the U.S. begins the deportation process, but the intended country won’t let the immigrant back in. Then they either have to wait in the U.S., regularly checking in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or they’re sent to wait in another country such as Panama.

The former is the case for many Southeast Asian refugees. More than 15,000 are currently living in the U.S. with orders of removal, but they can’t just let their lives stand still.

“What happens to people when they’re in this kind of immigration limbo?” Huynh asks. “What are your chances for social mobility or economic mobility for you and your U.S.-born children? What are your chances to get a job or rent a house?”

Centering refugee stories

Unfortunate facts about refugees’ legal situation and systemic oppression, however, don’t paint a full picture of their experiences and can portray them as passive, faceless victims rather than resilient, complex individuals.

Through writing her book, Huynh wants to give people the opportunity to create their own self-portraits, to share their hopes and dreams as well as their trials.

“This research is important because it centers refugee stories and makes them take ownership of their narratives and their interpretation of history,” she said. “This is not the kind of data that you can get from quantitative studies or statistics.”

In addition to the financial support provided, the Pipeline Grant program will also pair Huynh with a more advanced scholar with a similar background doing similar work. She will use the funding to travel and conduct interviews with Southeast Asian refugees throughout the U.S., relying on collaborations with local Asian American organizations like The Ba Lô Project, a grassroots mutual aid organization.

She particularly hopes to find community members willing to help interview refugees who don’t share her background.

“I’m not from Cambodia or Laos,” Huynh said. “So I think stronger interviews will be from people within their own communities doing this fieldwork.”

Asking existing research subjects to refer potential participants — known as respondent-driven sampling — will help Huynh reach people whose voices are not usually heard.

While “Unsettling Refugees” will present findings on the impact of deportation orders on Southeast Asian refugees, Huynh hopes it will also humanize the community and break down stereotypes.

As a sociologist, Huynh aims to explain inequities through systems of inequality. She hopes her research can bring attention not only to Southeast Asians, but also to others caught in the aftermath of war.

“A lot of Americans had hard feelings about what happened after the Vietnam War, but we also have to look at it from the perspective of the Vietnamese people,” she said. “We have to look at it from the perspective of impacted communities and how the U.S. has created a militarized global empire — there are wars that we know little about that are erased from public memory.”

Originally published by Adah McMillan at al.nd.edu on March 27, 2025.