IASH welcomes Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu who started with us in the Cultural Studies Program at the beginning of June.
Giang comes to us, most recently, from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania where she has been a Postdoctoral Fellow for the past few years. Giang is no stranger to Brisbane and UQ, having completed her PhD in the School of Communication and Arts in 2016. Her book Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge 2019) is the first monograph in English about contemporary Vietnamese media.
Giang’s postdoctoral project is called, “Embodying Precarity: Digital Media and the Emotional Politics of Vietnamese Motherhood” and will comprise four case studies of Vietnamese mothers’ anxiety about food, health, environment, and education, and the links between the mothers’ precarity and their sense of national belonging, geopolitics, and neoliberal aspiration. She will examine their use of digital platforms using feminist affect theories, critical transculturalism theories, and critical data studies. Giang is also interested in cultural memory, especially the constant reconstruction of the socialist past in now highly globalized and marketized Vietnam.
