Kelly Nguyen, PhD

IDEAL Provostial Fellow 

Department of Classics | Stanford University

This talk will discuss the making of the Vietnamese Refugee Archive Exhibit, a digital humanities project in collaboration with the Việt Museum and Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). Taking a community-engaged approach, the project worked closely with members of the Vietnamese refugee community in San Jose to create the Việt Museum’s official website, as well as its first curated online exhibit. The exhibit features digitized art and artifacts, in addition to oral history interviews, with the explicit intention of centering the diverse experiences and perspectives of Vietnamese refugees. This talk will reflect on the challenges of putting Critical Refugee Studies into practice while still respecting the mission of the museum and the heritage of a community in exile.