Christina Hughes

Dr. Christina Hughes is an interdisciplinary historical sociologist and self-described ex-demographer whose work draws on diverse methods to better understand how racial and gendered labor and punishment are organized within and across the Global North and South. Focusing on the imperial boomerang between Southeast Asia and the US West, her published research looks at a range of topics, from the colonial origins of modern policing and surveillance to the political economy of refugee resettlement and deportation. Currently she is working on completing her first book, Bad Refugees: Manufacturing Statelessness at the Margins of the Global North, which traces a transpacific genealogy of the “Bad Refugee” figure across Viet Nam and Orange County to historicize and critique the present deportation crisis. Her work has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including awards from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Mellon Foundation, the American Association for University Women, and the Minnesota Historical Society.

Recent Publications/Works:

• Christina Hughes (2026), “Anti-War Palimpsest in White Plaza: Stanford’s Militarized and Carceral Boomerang from Vietnam to Palestine in Times of Ongoing Crisis” in Arcade: A Digital Salon from the Stanford Humanities Center
• Christina Hughes and Ly Thuy Nguyen (2026). “Walk-Ins Welcome: A Conversation with Christina Hughes and Ly Thuy Nguyen” in diaCRITICS: Diasporic Vietnamese/Southeast Asian Literature and Art
• Gallery Exhibit: rehoming.art 
• Christina Hughes (2025), “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
• Christina Hughes (2025), “The Refugee Carceral Condition under Racial Capitalism: Histories of Intracommunity Policing across French Indochina, Cold War Southeast Asia, and US Resettlement Contexts” in the Journal of Transnational American Studies
• Christina Hughes and Karín Aguilar-San Juan (2025), “Introduction: Thinking with and Beyond “Vietnam”: 50 Years after the US Wars in Southeast Asia” in the Journal of Transnational American Studies

BA: UCLA 2011
MA/PhD: University of Washington 2022

Website: christinahughes.com