Christina Hughes
Assistant Professor
Drawing on diverse methods to better understand how everyday social life is embedded within the global political economy, her research broadly demonstrates how racial and gendered labor and punishment are organized within and across the Global North and South.
Carnegie 207E
[email protected]
she/her/hers
(On Research Leave AY 2025-26)
Christina Hughes is an interdisciplinary historical sociologist and self-described ex-demographer, with scholarship that now uses the insights of the former to largely critique—and find strategic routes within–-the quantified and datafied historical present created by the latter. Considering the emergence of Cold War social science as it intersected with the US Wars in Southeast Asia (“The Vietnam War,” “The Secret War”) and Department of Defense investments in computational warfare and atomic-era culture industries, her scholastic and creative work take up the more-than-material stakes of the US-led political economy of war in an era of compounding imperial catastrophes.
Her recently published “The Coloniality of Data: Police Databases and the Rationalization of Surveillance from Colonial Vietnam to the Modern Carceral State” in The British Journal of Sociology traces the early adoption of computer gang databases by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1980s to the deployment of computationally-assisted surveillance during the Vietnam War, specifically analyzing technologies displayed at the 1902-03 Hanoi Exposition in French Indochina and the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair during the Cold War. Offering the concept of the “coloniality of data,” the paper shows how global interpellations of the locatable criminal body in local, national, and international databases continue to constitute data itself as a rationalized—and increasingly automated—technology of colonial power.
Currently, she is on sabbatical and in residence at the Stanford Humanities Center as an External Faculty Fellow working on her first monograph, Bad Refugees: Manufacturing Statelessness at the Margins of the Global North. The book considers Southeast Asia and Orange County, California as an important transpacific site from which to critically interrogate the moral economy of refugee deportability, examining how the convergence of mass incarceration and migrant criminalization in part hinged on constitutive innovations in local and federal responses to the emerging Southeast Asian “gang problem.”
In her community-engaged work, she collaborates with various migrant and prison justice groups, the most longstanding of which is the California-based feminist transformative justice organization Success Stories. Right now she is working with formerly-incarcerated and directly impacted community members to develop a Participatory Action Research model for program alumni. Recently, she also curated and participated in the show RE/HOMING: WALK-INS WELCOME at Saint Paul’s XIA Gallery and Cafe.
Courses Taught: Suburbanization, Collective Memory, Social Science Inquiry, and Inequalities and Solidarities
BA: UCLA 2011
MA/PhD: University of Washington 2022
Website: christinamhughes.com