Project

Lost (in) Time: Making Home in Diasporic Space and Time

Program

ACLS Fellowship Program

Department

Geography

Abstract

"Lost (in) Time" examines refugee displacement and placemaking through the lens of time. Drawing on over two years of video ethnography with Vietnamese refugee families in the U.S. and their relatives in Việt Nam, it traces the remnants of war, family separations, and generational rifts to reveal how the Western linear ordering of time produces temporal ruptures and ongoing conditions of displacement for resettled Vietnamese refugees. "Lost (in) Time" argues that even as refugees experience temporal dislocations in resettlement; they engage in diasporic placemaking practices which mobilize nonlinear temporalities to make their host country home. This project reframes understanding of time-space not as linearly structured configurations but as multivariant constellations.