One Million Neighbors is a limited podcast series about how American faith communities mobilized to do the impossible: resettling more than a million Southeast Asian refugees, in the face of widespread hostility toward migrants.
Dr. Melissa Borja is Associate Professor of American Culture and Director of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan. Trained at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Columbia, she is a historian of migration, religion, race, and politics and author of Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change (Harvard University Press), which won the Thomas Wilson Memorial Prize, the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History, and the Outstanding Achievement Award in History from the Association for Asian American Studies. Dr. Borja has advised Princeton's Religion and Forced Migration Initiative and Bridging Divides Initiative. An expert on anti-Asian racism during the Covid-19 pandemic, she leads the Virulent Hate Project and has contributed research to Stop AAPI Hate. She is a co-founder of Hoosier Asian American Power and has been active in faith-based refugee resettlement efforts in Indianapolis, where she lives with her family. In honor of her research and advocacy about Asian Americans, USA Today honored her as one of its 2022 Women of the Year.
This podcast is part of AAPI Stories of Faith & Life, an Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) project funded by Lilly Endowment Incorporated.
www.aparri.org
