Laotian Daughters Working Toward Community, Belonging, and Environmental Justice

"Laotian Daughters convincingly argues that children of refugees embody a pivotal social location that allows for deeper, more complex insights into such pressing issues as cultural citizenship, political belonging, and national identity. Shah's weaving together of social scientific research, cultural studies, and literary analysis is seamless. I am particularly excited by the incorporation of environmental justice literature into this mix, which is rare. The book's greatest strength remains the young activists whose stories bring this book to life. Laotian Daughters is part of an important, growing intellectual body of research on the U.S. second generation, and this ethnographic study of Laotian teenagers fills a significant niche."
-Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, and author of Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs

"Laotian Daughters tells an interesting tale about a handful of Laotian teens, who have an opportunity to hone their evolving political sensibilities in the company of others. Shah's effort to 'explore identity based on politics rather than politics based on identity' is nuanced and rich. She successfully documents the complex divisions among a group of girls who, despite similar struggles, connect and incorporate ethnic, class, generational, and cultural diversity into their identities differently." Mobilization, Winter 2013 "The book demonstrates quite effectively how environmental justice activism bridges questions of citizenship, rights, race, culture, and national identity... [T]he best part of the book [is] the careful parsing of the potentiality and limitations of Asian Youth Advocates's [AYA] intervention into the teens' political subjectivity. [Shah] demonstrates the contradictions between prevailing liberal models of citizenship and existing inequalities based on group membership, as well as the partial and contingent success of AYA's campaign to empower these young women." - American Journal of Sociology