"The Oriental Gang Unit: Policing and the Construction of the Criminal Asian Immigrant in New York City"

Vivian Troung, Swarthmore College

Location: 210 Dickinson Hall & Zoom 

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Vivian Truong is Assistant Professor of History at Swarthmore College. She is a community-engaged scholar whose research and teaching interests include Asian American, urban, and social movement history. Her current research project examines Asian American and multiracial movements against police violence in late 20th-century New York City. Based on oral histories and newly recovered archival sources, this project examines cases including the 1995 police killing of Chinese teenager Yong Xin Huang in Brooklyn and the eviction of Vietnamese street vendors from Chinatown under the broken windows policing regime. An article drawn from this research, "From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City: The Policing of Asian Immigrants in Southern Brooklyn, 1987-1995," was published in the Journal of Asian American Studies.

At Swarthmore, Truong teaches courses on 20th-century U.S. history and Asian American history. Her teaching and research are informed by her community engagement. She co-coordinates two public history projects: the first preserves and engages with the archive of the grassroots organization CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities (formerly known as the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) in New York City, and the second, A/P/A Voices, documents the experiences of Asian/Pacific/Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic through oral history and the collection of digital artifacts. Truong received her PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.