Christina Hughes

Christina Hughes received her undergraduate degrees in Sociology and International Development Studies from UCLA and earned a doctorate in Sociology at the University of Washington-Seattle. 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.

Hughes is currently working on writing a book manuscript called Bad Refugees using over two years of participant observations with Vietnamese American gang members, life history interviews, and archival records to show how refugee status is a political category that allows powerful countries to claim moral authority while also closing their borders to masses of displaced people seeking resettlement. Centering the experience of diasporic Vietnamese refugees who resettled in the United States following the Vietnam War and who later came to experience incarceration and deportation in their new home, the argument questions the moral basis from which state authority legitimates itself to act by re-examining the political economic import of the Vietnam War and its consequences for state carceral expansion in the final quarter of the twentieth century. In addition, she is also working on a new collaborative mixed-methods project alongside a transformative justice organization delivering feminist programming in California state prisons. Founded by two formerly incarcerated program alumni, the work will be conducted in community with the organization to examine how rejecting punitive solutions in favor of a transformative justice approach might work in practice towards building an abolitionist present and future.

BA: UCLA 2011

MA: University of Washington 2014

PhD: University of Washington 2022