Giang Nguyen-Thu

Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu is a Senior Lecturer and a DECRA Research Fellow at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. She is affiliated with the Center for Digital Cultures and Societies, UQ.

Dr Nguyen-Thu is currently working on her DECRA project “Too quick or too slow: Digital temporalities in networked Vietnam” (2024-2027). For this project, she explores the multiple, tangled, and contesting temporalities, or the lived experiences of time, on the ground of digital development in Vietnam. Through various case studies, she will investigate digital temporalities as plotted on the interstices of social habits, historical burdens, infrastructural layers, and human subjectivities to challenge the illusion of frictionless technological expansion.

Dr Nguyen-Thu’s interest in the cultural politics of digital time-making stems from her lasting curiosity about the interplay between media and the rapid process of economic development in Vietnam after the Reform (Đổi Mới) in 1986. Her first monograph, Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge 2019), explores how the advent of popular television reshapes the sense of national belonging in Vietnam. This monograph is the first scholarly book about contemporary Vietnamese media in the English language.

In addition to her independent research, Dr Nguyen-Thu serves as a chief investigator of the collaborative ARC Discover Project “Digital Transaction Platforms in Asia” (2022-2026), led by Assoc. Prof Adrian Athique. For this DP project, she investigates the gendered dimensions of digital transactions in Vietnam, focusing on the experiences of male delivery workers and female online retailers.