Professional Biography
Linda M. Pheng (pronounced ‘Peng’) is a Cambodian American scholar and assistant professor with expertise in community-based education and critical youth work for youth of immigrant and refugee backgrounds. Dr. Pheng studies race and ethnicity, displacement and belonging, and movements and memory in the aftermath of forced migration. Specifically, her research aims to unpack how multiple and interlocking oppressions are experienced by working class Asian/Southeast Asian immigrant and refugee populations in formal and informal educational spaces. Prior to joining Penn GSE, Dr. Pheng has worked in nonprofit educational spaces in both the U.S. and Cambodia.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Pheng’s current research project is a book manuscript that asks the following question: “What are the processes through which Southeast Asian American students transform spaces that treat them as foreign or temporary into sites of culture, identity, and belonging?” Employing an ethnographic approach, the study examines (1) how racialized and classed discourses of Asian American, immigrant, and refugee identities shape students’ experiences of inclusion/exclusion in schools and beyond; (2) the processes through which students resist educational erasure in community-based educational spaces; and (3) the pedagogical practices utilized by community-based educational spaces in response to historical and ongoing configurations of displacement.
