Social Worlds

Critique – Creation as Method

1. Critique: Invisible labor, agency, marginalized voices

Critique is fundamental to the humanistic project of contextual understanding of knowledge production–from the authors, audiences, and media forms, to the structural and intentional absences in the cultural record as a product of racism, capitalism, sexism, and other hegemonic power structures designed to self-perpetuate universal knowledge projects. 

2. Creation: reimagining/narrativizing/speculation

The second key part of my decolonial framework is to move towards ‘creation’ as a careful act of reparative justice against silences and epistemic inequity. Creation centers critical fabulation, imagination, and worldbuilding towards a pluriverse of humanistic understanding centering and caring for silenced actors from colonial documentation regimes. This interwoven framework builds off of the fundamental work in black feminist studies (Saidiya Hartman, bell hooks), decoloniality and decolonization (Roopika Risam, Alex Gil, Walter Mignolo, Ma Vang), to move towards a pluriverse of understanding through experimental digital analysis and narrative. 

By using a decolonial critique-creation framework, we seek to move away from binaries of colonialism v. anti-colonialism, West v. East, exogenous v. indigenous, towards understanding relationships, complexity, and context.

VIETNAMESE SOCIAL WORLDS

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CAMBODIAN SOCIAL WORLDS

Slow Viewing Workshop

In this workshop, Dr. Nguyen invites participants to practice a ‘slow viewing, slow listening, slow thinking,’ process of meaning making in virtual reality that can be taught in classrooms focused on world history, global Asias, and digital media and design. Dr. Nguyen leads an exploration of Virtual Angkor, a virtual reconstruction of the medieval Cambodian capital of Angkor that seeks to explore the diversity and complexity of Southeast Asia in digital heritage studies. Virtual Angkor reappraises the neglected region of Southeast Asia as a dynamic and important center for understanding global processes of premodern urbanisms, climate change, and ‘non-western’ forms of governance and power. This workshop invites participants to enter a VR space to listen, examine, and question. The experience aims to facilitate a ‘critical making’ understanding of the past which undermines the romanticized representations of the exoticized orient or the ruins of Angkor that permeate both the French colonial record and the contemporary tourism industry complex of Cambodia.