Sarah Nguyễn

Sarah Nguyễn investigates information infrastructures & information disorder among immigrant and non-English diasporic communities. They apply theory into practice at the intersections of information & media infrastructures, information disorder, embodied memories, archival studies, Asian American studies, & immigrant studies. Grounded in Black and Asian technocultures with feminist practices of care, Sarah centers contextual, archival, qualitative, and community participatory methodologies alongside social media analysis.

Currently, Sarah contributes to the NSF Rapid Response Research with UW Center for an Informed Public about problematic discourse discourse within the Vietnamese and Latine diaspora, and an UW iSchool Strategic Research Fund with the AfterLab about community archives in response to COVID-19. They are a community researcher for a joint project between Seattle’s InterIm CDA and Friends of Little Sài Gòn—Preserving Our Community: The CID People’s Anti-Displacement Project, to build advocacy for community housing in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. Her research has been featured in Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, VICE, BuzzFeed News, KUOW Public Radio, NPR, Saigon Broadcasting Television Network, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, and InDance magazine. Sarah is a PhD student for the UW Information School and an Assistant Director for the Moris Women’s Center.

View Sarah's artifact and accompanying bilingual illustrated booklet.

Sarah's project summary:

Bridging my praxis in libraries and archives and my current research about the Vietnamese diaspora, information disorder, archival studies, and embodied memories, this poster is an intermedia piece that represents an experimental test ground to engage with the transnational and temporal Vietnamese diaspora and their information diet. The background is an enlarged venn diagram from a focus group and qualitative coding study co-researchers and myself conducted in 2021. More information in Political Communication article, "“We Never Really Talked About politics”: Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces Structuring Information Disorder Within the Vietnamese Diaspora" (doi/10.1080/10584609.2023.2201940).

The venn diagram demonstrates differences and similarities of information and media sources that Vietnamese Americans expressed to trust, distrust, and simply interact with. The circle on the viewer's left side represents Vietnamese refugees and immigrants from the first and second wave of migration post-1975. The circle on the viewer's right side represents second generation Vietnamese Americans and first generation Vietnamese people who also identify as Gen Z. In the foreground, there are illustrations done by research and artist collaborator, Anh Nguyen (BFA). These illustrations depict the information sources and communication technology platforms that Vietnamese Americans interface across generations. These panels show how the diversity in information and media sources can play a role in the information divide and political polarization we have seen within communities. More information about intergenerational, language, and information divides can be found from our Facebook data analysis in the CSCW article "Sending News Back Home: Misinformation Lost in Transnational Social Networks" (doi/10.1145/3579521). The full story around these illustrated panels can be found in the short bilingual illustrated booklet "Changing Tides" available at osf.io/ve4xd.

3D elements on the poster include my own hair, silk textile, acrylic paint, ink from linocut block, and Joss paper. Each object plays a role in Vietnamese diasporic culture which has influenced my positionality and approach to the broader research work.