About

Yến Lê Espiritu is associated with the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to research, teaching, and public initiatives on refugees. The collective focuses on establishing a field that traces the impact of colonialism, imperialism, militarization, and other factors on refugee movements, while integrating scholarly, policy, artistic, legal, diplomatic, and international relations interests with refugees’ everyday experiences. Their work emphasizes public engagement, community collaboration, and respect, aiming to challenge traditional paradigms of refugee research and discourse within the academy and beyond. The collective seeks to change the dehumanizing narratives surrounding refugees by fostering humane, reciprocal, and inclusive approaches that recognize refugees as fellow human beings with fundamental rights.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Science
• History
• Mechanical engineering
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Pedagogy
• Genealogy
• Criminology
• Gender studies
• Nursing

Selected publications

• <i>Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora</i> , edited by Nathalie Huỳnh Châu Nguyễn

  Journal of Vietnamese Studies · 2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Militarism and Migration

  2026-03-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the deep entanglement between U.S. militarism and global migration, challenging dominant narratives that frame displaced people as threats or crises. Tracing the history of colonial conquest, military expansion, and imperial warfare, the chapter reveals how militarized violence has displaced millions—from Indigenous peoples and Mexican communities at the U.S. border to refugees from Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine, and beyond. Centering the voices of migrants, youth, and feminist activists, the chapter highlights how militarism is not only a driver of forced migration but also a structure of everyday violence. It uplifts movements for demilitarization that expose U.S. empire, resist racialized state violence, and reimagine safety through community, care, and solidarity. Ultimately, the chapter calls for an abolitionist, decolonial, and justice-centered approach to migration that confronts militarism at its roots.

  PublisherDOI

• Loss and Found

  English Language Notes · 2025-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Situated in the field of critical refugee studies, this article conceptualizes refugee loss not as a psychological matter but as a site of social critique that is laden with political potential. Focusing on what is lost, what remains, and what is found as refugees move between past, present, and future, the article pays particular attention to the ways that refugees push against but also at times bridge multiple borders, boundaries, and barriers. Bridging kinship and queer studies with critical refugee studies, the article introduces the term sutured kinship—horizontal connections that develop to tend to the wounds caused by imperial and military violence among incommensurable yet linked groups—and offers as an example Vietnamese refugees’ outpouring of support to Syrian refugees in the mid-2010s. This critical juxtaposition of Vietnamese and Syrian refugee experiences makes visible the global historical conditions, across space and time, that link their displacement and assesses the possibilities of kinship making among refugees from the global South who are linked by intertwined yet differing political histories and displacement experiences.

  PublisherDOI

• Remembering, Remembrance, Re-Memory

  Open Collections · 2024-07-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In conversation with Y-Dang Troeung’s meditation, in Landbridge, on the unacknowledged loss of her mother’s brothers, this intergenerational dialogue reflects on refugee grief, not as a private or depoliticized sentiment, but as a resource for confronting the conditions under which certain lives are considered more grievable than others. For Yến, the public execution of her beloved cậu hai (oldest maternal uncle) was both a private loss and a public remembrance. For Evyn, the death of her ông hai (granduncle), whom she never met, profoundly shaped her understanding of family, loss, and the politics of remembering. The piece asks: Who owns the dead, and to what end? Who uses the dead, and how? What is the relationship between private grief, public memory, and intergenerational inheritance? How can the next generation commemorate the loss of their elders while forging new pathways and posing new questions about our current moment and beyond?

  PublisherDOI

• “Livability” and “Ungratefulness”: A Refugee Critique of the Law and Humanitarianism

  Social Inclusion · 2024-09-30 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Critical refugee studies (CRS) conceptualizes refugees’ lived experience as a site of theory‐making and knowledge production with and for refugees. As co‐founders of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC), and as scholars with refugee backgrounds, we theorize alongside our refugee partners to offer a refugee critique of refugee law and humanitarianism. Departing from the 1951 Refugee Convention definition of “refugee,” whose restrictive legal and historical framing cannot account for the complex conditions that displace human beings, we offer the concept of “livability” to name the mundane, creative, and fearless possibilities of living that undergird refugees’ claims to move audaciously. Furthermore, departing from humanitarian narratives that expect refugees to be forever thankful for having been rescued, we propose the concept of “ungratefulness” to describe refugee refusal to exhibit gratitude and deference for the space they have been allowed. Our critique emerged from sustained engagement with refugee partners through in‐person and virtual gatherings organized by the CRSC. Together, we argue that livability and ungratefulness constitute examples of “epistemic disobedience” of the colonial and unilateral knowledge production about refugees, as they call attention to distinctly discernible refugee agency and epistemology that break with the historically appointed role of refugees as seen entirely through a lens of precarity and gratitude.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 1. Critical Immigration and Refugee Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach

  New York University Press eBooks · 2023-06-30 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Social and Curricular Inclusion in Refugee Education: Critical Approaches to Education Advocacy

  Social Inclusion · 2023 · 5 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Recognizing refugee students, families, and communities as a source of knowledge and social change, this article offers two case studies of innovative, deliberative, and labor‐intensive practices toward meaningful social inclusion of refugee parents and students in education. The first example focuses on the multiyear effort by the Parent‐Student‐Resident Organization (PSRO) in San Diego, California, an education advocacy group organized and led by local parents to institutionalize social inclusion programs for refugees and other systemically excluded students. The second example analyzes the Refugee Teaching Institute in Merced, California, organized with the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC), to work with teachers to create a refugee‐centered curriculum. In both case studies, organizers depart from deficit models of refugee education by foregrounding student and parent empowerment and bringing together diverse stakeholders to generate and implement a shared vision for teaching and learning. Through sharing insights glimpsed from participant observation and extended conversations with participants in each case study, this article shifts the reference point in refugee education from that of school authorities to that of refugees themselves. Through reflecting on the challenges of effecting systemic change, we argue for a model of educational transformation that is ongoing, intentionally collaborative, and cumulative.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Contents

  2022-09-20

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 4. A Refugee Critique of Representations: On Criticality and Creativity

  2022-09-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 2. A Refugee Critique of Fear: On Livability and Durability

  2022-09-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lan Duong

  8 shared

• Jonathan Skinner

  3 shared

• Geoffrey Hosking

  3 shared

• Lisa Lowe

  Getty Research Institute

  3 shared

• Lisa Yoneyama

  University of Toronto

  3 shared

• Dana Y. Takagi

  3 shared

• David Leiwei Li

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2 shared

• Vijay Prashad

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Eleanor Roosevelt College's Outstanding Faculty Award
• Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award
• Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Awards for Excell…
• Inaugural recipient of the Association for Asian American St…