Carl A. Grant Scholars Lecture | Narrative Stitching Across Contact Zones: Hmong American Student Cartographies of War, Migration, and Belonging
April 21, 2026, 11 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Wisconsin Idea Room 159, Education Building and online
Rican Vue
Associate Professor of Higher Education, University of California, Riverside
What happens when students whose histories span war, displacement, and diaspora enter institutions that rarely recognize those histories?
This talk examines how Hmong American students narrate identity across these layered histories through narrative stitching — the labor of connecting fragmented experiences across time and place. Drawing on student narratives that emerge in every-campus encounters, the talk shows how Hmong American students map relationships between family histories of war and migration and their contemporary experiences in higher education. These stories move across contact zones, linking geopolitical histories to everyday questions of recognition. Through these narrative practices, students produce cartographies of war, migration, and belonging, revealing how belonging in higher education is forged and claimed through narratives that connect diasporic histories across continents and generations.
