College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

Angie Ngọc Trần

Angie Ngọc Trần was born and raised in Saigon, Vietnam, from where she escaped by boat, settling in southern California. After her undergraduate years at CSU Long Beach, she obtained a doctorate in political economy at the University of Southern California. She joined the CSU Monterey Bay faculty, where she has taught for over 25 years. She brings her life experiences and her research findings into her classroom through courses in history of economic thought, global economics, labor-based service learning, global migrant workers, critical perspectives on CSR, and US in Vietnam and Asia-Pacific among others. She loves to engage and work with students from SBGS and across campus in her classes and in their own capstone research projects.

An activist scholar, she has researched and published on Vietnam and transnational labor migration and resistance in Vietnam, Malaysia, the US and Mexico. Her wide-ranging research interests and publications include critical perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), impacts of multi-stakeholder negotiations on labor-management-state relations in Vietnam, the complex role of labor newspapers in Vietnam, and implications of international trade agreements on labor unions and workers. Her 2022 book project, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment: Economic Migration between Vietnam and Malaysia integrates ethnicity, class, gender, religion, cultural resources, and third space of dissent and empowerment of five different ethnic groups in Vietnam, the Kinh, Hoa, Cham Muslims, Khmer and Hrê, working as guestworkers in Malaysia, returning and resuming their lives in Vietnam. Her co-authored study with Dr. Lorenzo Covarrubias is entitled “Promises Not Kept? The Rights of Migrant H-2A Visa Guestworkers in California's Agricultural Industry.” It focuses on the impacts of a modern-day guestworker program on the living and working conditions of agricultural workers (mostly ethnic groups from Mexico), who toil in the fields under the heat to harvest our foods on a short-term contractual basis and return to Mexico. Her ongoing research interests are on Vietnamese domestic workers (of different ethnic groups) in Saudi Arabia. Access to her publications can be found here: https://researchprofiles.csumb.edu/en/persons/angie-ngoc-tran