Teaching and Learning with Y-Dang Troeung

As I write this, Palestinians are being genocided. I think back to when I attended a solidarity rally in support of Palestine with Y-Dang in 2021, when the Israeli government, supported by funding from Canadian and other governments, was once again killing and maiming Palestinians, and protests against the slaughter of a people were, as they continue to be, conflated with the horrors of antisemitism. 

I think about Palestinian colleagues and students who risk being deemed “terrorists,” “jihadists,” or “ungrateful” if they openly mourn or protest the murders of their families. I contrast this with quick statements of support for Ukraine, including statements of solidarity on institutional websites and efforts to find places in Canadian universities for Ukrainian students and faculty at risk. In response to requests for universities to speak out on Palestine, came statements from universities made statements about the importance of neutrality. How can one be neutral about genocide? About the destruction of all higher educational institutions in Gaza? 

In Refugee Lifeworlds, Y-Dang refuses to allow the reader an easy escape into Canadian exceptionalism. She weaves the stories of her family with the genocidal realities that are not of the past, but the present and future. Defining the lifeworld as a “space of regeneration” for refugees, Y-Dang explains that 

the lifeworld strives to reactivate and reanimate refugee ways of knowing and being that have been destroyed, depoliticized, and evacuated of meaning in the service of maintaining the liberal imperial status quo. Never wholly outside of, nor fully disciplined by, the infrastructures of legalistic, bureaucratic, and diagnostic power, refugee lifeworlds are the continually negotiated space of loss and survival, injury and joy, accommodation and refusal. (Refugee 10)

As Y-Dang eloquently demonstrates, people resist oppression. It isn’t that Cambodians didn’t resist. It isn’t that they lacked knowledge, but that their knowledge was deemed irrelevant and their lives deemed disposable. Y-Dang’s work on lifeworlds has been crucial to my work with students in understanding the negotiation of space. 

Pedagogy of Solidarity 

Y-Dang and I often discussed our experiences engaging students in conversations about different forms of oppression in ways that neither conflate causes nor foreclose solidarity, instead helping students understand how struggles are interconnected. How can we, as educators, ensure a pedagogy that does not homogenize struggles, knowledge, or ways of being, while also exploring how different forms of systemic oppression intersect and/or are treated as outliers? The role of Canada in the Nakba, the histories and struggles of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the continuation of eugenics in Canada, and so many other examples of oppression have separate histories; however, they are connected by the normalization of oppression and the expectation of gratitude for that oppression. To move from episodic acknowledgement of oppression to systemic change requires solidarity. As Jasbir Paur demonstrates, the debilitation of populations is central to settler-colonial projects. She demonstrates how the Israeli state deliberately shoots to maim Palestinians—to preserve them as examples of their power. They also use Israeli universities to provide the justification and tools for carrying out genocide of Palestinians, as Maya Wind has shown. 

But Canada Is Different! 

A common student refrain when I assign articles about racism in the US in my courses is, “But Canada is different.” The narrative of Canada as a country of friendly peacemakers who say “Eh?” and “Sorry” is taught from an early age. Y-Dang’s writing invites students to explore the effects of this totalizing narrative on our collective ability to expand our ways of knowing and acting. 

I’m reminded, for example, of Y-Dang’s narrative of her family arriving in Canada and being whisked to Ottawa to meet then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. An image of Y-Dang as a baby, a Canadian flag in her hand, has been forever memorialized by the CBC as proof of Canada’s generosity, despite Y-Dang’s later requests that it be removed from the CBC website. The lifeworld of the refugee, as Y-Dang points out, is disconnected from “the liberal imperial technologies of governance designed to police the boundaries of when, how, and who is granted asylum and thus accorded legibility by the settler-colonial nation-state” (Refugee 5). 

The settler-colonial cycle of participation in violence—apologizing for it as an outlier, a transgression, a thing of the past, and expecting gratitude from recipients of what appears to be generosity—is a predictable pattern. In the coming decades, after decision makers complicit in the Palestinian genocide have passed away, a new generation of decision makers will perhaps apologize for their predecessors’ actions and reassure the world, “Never again.” Palestinian refugees and their descendants, living with the wounds of their ancestors, will be expected to “get over it” and to show gratitude to Canada for having accepted them as refugees. Those who apologize can do so with a sense of distance while becoming architects of new state violence. This cycle perpetuates the myth that past injustices have been resolved and that, today, we know better. 

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside 

I returned to Y-Dang’s work, particularly Refugee Lifeworlds, when I was the Academic Director of a university-run, community-based centre in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).

Working in the DTES comes with tremendous power for those of us who are white and deemed to be caring and good people by virtue of working in such a “difficult community”—by those outside the community. I lost track of how often I was praised for working in such a “difficult place.” 

The DTES is intricately linked to global geopolitics and racial capitalism. When I ask students, “What do you know about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside?”, they usually talk about street disorder, drugs, crime, and homelessness. What is less known is that the DTES was once a rich, fertile land and that the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations who lived there were killed, expelled, put on reserves, and sent to schools where many more died. 

The few blocks comprising the DTES and Chinatown was once home for Chinese labourers and Japanese businesses. After the Canadian Pacific Railroad was completed in 1885, Chinese labourers were deemed no longer necessary, and the Canadian government imposed a head tax, which made it impossible for most Chinese labourers to afford to sponsor their families to join them. Japanese homes and businesses were sold off to white people during WWII, when the government sent Japanese Canadians to internment camps. 

The Black community also had a vibrant presence in Strathcona, the neighbourhood just south of the DTES, but the centre of that community, Hogan’s Alley, was destroyed to make way for the Georgia Viaduct. Frequently, people are released from psychiatric hospitals and dropped off in the DTES with no resources. People deemed “feeble-minded” were also released from institutions and displaced to the DTES. Today, in the DTES, many of those deemed disposable line up in hopes of having a cot to sleep on for the night. 

Resistance 

However, to stop at this retelling of history is problematic because it overlooks resistance. People in the DTES have been leaders in cooperative housing, the fight for food justice and safe injection sites, the refusal of the erasure of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and the fight for HIV/AIDS treatment. Instead of seeing the people of the DTES as needing more surveillance cast as “help,” we can look to Y-Dang’s work on abolitionist knowledge “that reconceptualizes notions like crime and innocence; disability, madness, and rehabilitation; ideas of punishment; notions of freedom and equality; and concepts of danger and protection” (Refugee 19). 

It is through resistance that we discover the possibility of small islands to think and act. The challenge is to find ways to pedagogically open discussions to find these small and temporary spaces and to develop, with our students, the capacity to create new spaces when existing ones are closed. 

With great love and care, Y-Dang weaves her family’s story into an analysis that refuses to allow readers the usual comfortable tropes of a Canada as peacemaking nation. But she doesn’t leave us with critique alone. Y-Dang invites us into conversation to build new lifeworlds. And, in her posthumously published article “Refugee Race-Ability,” she leaves us with the challenge of cripping critical refugee studies. She asks: 

What might a cripping of Critical Refugee Studies look like? As an analytic, refugee race-ability offers a hermeneutic of cripping the refugee narrative, if you will, in the service of refugee and disability justice, not just for the individual, but at interlocking scales of community, from the collective, to the transnational, to the planetary. (280)

This challenge has radically changed how I teach and think about disability and refugee justice. Rather than individualizing trauma, Y-Dang provides a scholarship of engagement that refuses colonial violence’s claims of neutrality in the face of genocide. In doing so, she teaches us to understand that lifeworlds are structured around lifewords that subvert colonial histories. 

In the context of teaching, I look at Y-Dang’s world to help myself and my students not get stuck in despair, but to look at the interconnections of debility, racism, and climate collapse as a long process of imperialism that results in cycles of erasure that necessitate collective intervention to break open cracks—and to know that this work is never complete. 

I will be forever grateful for her brilliant scholarship, grounded in immense love, generosity, humour, courage, and solidarity—scholarship that I constantly return to and have included on required reading lists for all my students. 

Thank you, Y-Dang. 

Works Cited

Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke UP, 2017. 

Troeung, Y – Dang. Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. Temple UP, 2022. 

—. “Refugee Race-Ability: Bodies, Lands, Worlds.” The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, edited by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen, Routledge, 2023. 

Wind, Maya. Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. Verso, 2024. 

Michelle Stack, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies. Her central research interest concerns how people, knowledge, and institutions are categorized and the influence of these categorizations on our collective ability to respond to the rise of fascism and climate injustice. She is the editor of Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge (Open Access Book, U of Toronto P), and “Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic: University Rankings or Co-operatives as a Strategy for Developing an Equitable and Resilient Post-Secondary Education Sector?” (International Review of Education). She was an inaugural Knowledge Exchange and Mobilization Scholar for UBC, and she received the Inaugural Public Humanities Hub award in recognition of her work as a public scholar and her commitment to assisting students and colleagues in expanding scholarly conversations through media engagement.