My comparative research asks how different religious traditions - particularly Catholicism and Caodaism (a religion born in 1926 under French colonialism in Vietnam and is comprised of Western and Eastern religious elements) - form and maintain Vietnamese religious diasporas based in the U.S. and Cambodia, which have the largest overseas Vietnamese populations.
In my peer-reviewed publications and in-progress book manuscript tentatively titled The New Chosen People: Religion and Race in the Vietnamese Diasporas, I argue that the shared experiences of racialization are a catalyst for diasporic formation among ethnic Vietnamese in the U.S. and Cambodia, which, until within the past ten years, had been isolated from each other for more than three decades due to the history of war, forced displacement, and economic instability in mainland Southeast Asia.
Studying these vibrant minority religious groups in different national contexts illuminates the power that faith, in partnership with race, serves in the formation of ethnic cultures and diasporic communities. This emergent diversity invites a critical re-thinking of religion and race as proxies for civic participation, cultural pluralism, and citizenship. My research thus speaks to broader interdisciplinary questions of how religion globalizes the Asian race and ethnicity - or at least make them possible in new ways - in contemporary society.