Courtnie Bui Wins First Place in Southeast Asia Digital Library Undergraduate Paper Competition

We are proud to announce that Courtnie Bui, one of our talented students, has been awarded first place in the fifth annual Southeast Asia Digital Library Undergraduate Paper competition.

Read Courtnie’s Award-Winning Paper

^{Meet Courtnie}
 

I am a junior in Silliman College studying linguistic anthropology and ethnography. My paper, “The Nationhood of Vietnamese America,” was written for Prof. David Thang Moe’s course on Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Southeast Asia. I used ethnographic methods to examine the “cultural freeze” phenomenon in the Vietnamese-American diaspora, and explored the implications of this phenomenon on collective diasporic identity to ask the question of whether migrant communities can be considered nations in their own right—reflecting more broadly on what it means to have a cultural identity and be a part of a nation. My lived experiences as the proud daughter of two Vietnamese immigrants, to whom I owe everything, entirely shape my academic work in the fields of anthropology and Asian American studies.