Lindsey plans to research construction of student conservation knowledge and how students merge western science with Indigenous and local knowledge systems while in an immersive travel experience. She was named Edina’s 2021 Rotarian of the Year. She volunteers in many capacities through the Rotary, including coordinating and running the Rotary-sponsored Global Scholar Program, participating in a service expedition to Guatemala, and taking part in both the International Grants and Diversity and Equity Committees. Lindsey is also a National Geographic Certified Educator and is a part of the Rotary Club of Edina. She has led student conservation research expeditions to South Africa (2017), Fiji (2018), and Ecuador (2019). Lindsey coordinates science student travel, specifically environmental conservation research while connecting students to Indigenous communities with their fieldwork. Her passion for global and international education was sparked by her experience as a Fulbright Fellow in Morocco in 2019 where she researched the language of instruction in science education. student, she teaches chemistry and coordinates the Global Scholar Program at Edina High School in Edina, Minnesota.

Lindsey Smaka (she/her/hers) is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Comparative and International Development Education at UMN-TC. Thus, in thinking through Hmong America as an archipelago, this paper will seek to demonstrate how Hmong understandings of refugee resettlement in the United States offer a critique of environmental degradation that would otherwise remain opaque. Nevertheless, the fields of Island Studies and Archipelagic American Studies, already concerned with the environmental impacts of imperialism, offer crucial frameworks that render this critique of empire legible.

Importantly, this sort of violence is not always immediately apparent, hidden under the overlapping layers of destruction that compose Hmong refugee history.

For Hmong refugees resettled in the United States, however, environmental destruction has served as a constituent part of their understanding of the violence of displacement. Often focused on illuminating structures of war, displacement, and racialization, another crucial component and aftereffect of imperial violence–environmental degradation–has flown under the radar. Title: “Towards an Archipelagic Hmong American Critique: Island Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and the Ecological Destruction of Empire”Ībstract: The burgeoning field of critical refugee studies has conceptualized the figure of the refugee as an embodied critique of imperialism and its attendant violences. When not occupied by his studies, he spends his time working and volunteering with DREAMers of Wisconsin and the PEOPLE program at UW-Madison, working to reduce educational disparities for underserved high school and college students in his home state. His dissertation research centers on histories of the Hmong diaspora and Southeast Asian refugee resettlement in the United States. student in the History Department at UMN-TC studying under Dr. Alex Hopp (he/him/his) is a second-year Ph.D.

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