Community Teaching: Storytelling as Pedagogy

This talk will reflect on the ongoing formation of HMoob Studies through community teaching as a way to shift knowledge and expertise. Community teaching, the talk will argue, centers storytelling practices that are integral to Hmong, other refugee communities, and Indigenous and Black communities in research and teaching. These stories constitute community epistemologies or ways of knowing that anchor historical and ongoing experiences of violence but also agency. Storytelling as pedagogy allows for new forms of knowledge, such as the transmission of war memory, to be produced and shared. HMoob Studies research and teaching are not just about changing institutions of learning but also about using refugee/community knowledge toward dismantling systems that produce violence and displacement.