The Work of Refuge - SFU Global Asia Speaker Series

This talk attends to the everyday labour that went into making Vietnamese refugee life possible in spaces of overseas resettlement.
About this Event

This event is part of the SFU Global Asia Program 30th Anniversary, Fall 2026 Speaker Series. You may particpate in-person or online, please specify when registering.

This talk, The Work of Refuge, attends to the everyday labour that went into making Vietnamese refugee life possible in spaces of overseas resettlement. Using the post-1975 exodus of Vietnamese boat people to Hong Kong as a historical and geographical fulcrum, it argues that a more complex and nuanced understanding of the refugee experience in the city must necessarily account for their (self)positioning as working subjects. Through a close reading of sources pulled from the Hong Kong Public Records and the Southeast Asian Archive at the University of California Irvine, I identify three (transoceanic) forms of labour that sustained refugee life in Hong Kong. They are: 1) the waged labour of precarious employment; 2) the various forms of in-situ social reproductive labour carried out by community members and local volunteers; and 3) the transnational politics of solidarity and relation work that connected the camps in Hong Kong to concerned stakeholders in key sites of overseas resettlement, including British Columbia and California.
About the speaker: Wesley Attewell is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Geography at the University of Hong Kong. He works at the intersection of human geography, American studies, and Asian diaspora studies to map the transnational geographies of US empire building from the Cold War into the present. His first book, The Quiet Violence of Empire: How USAID Waged Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. He is currently working on a second monograph, which is titled The Lifelines of Empire: Logistical Life in the Decolonizing Pacific, as well as a collaborative book project on Vietnam War photography and the gendered work of empire.

Light refreshments will be provided. Dietary requests can be made when registering.

Tranportation to the event:

• Bike parking is available at the Hastings entrance of SFU Harbour Centre. Visit the Vancouver campus’s Cycling Resources for details on bicycle racks and cages.
• The nearest SkyTrain station to SFU's Vancouver campus is Waterfront Station. Waterfront Station is also served daily by SeaBus and the West Coast Express commuter train, and numerous buses serve the downtown area.
• Parking is available at 450 West Cordova Street (Impark) and 443 Seymour Street (Diamond Parking). Metered street parking can also be found nearby.