Announcing the 2023-24 Humanities Faculty Fellow

We are proud to announce that assistant professor Tri Phuong (Pacific and Asian Studies) has been named Faculty Fellow for the 2023-24 academic year.

Phuong will use the fellowship to work on his book project, The Politics of Play: New Media and Social Movement in Contemporary Vietnam.

As he states in his application, this work “examines the role of media and the mediascape of contemporary Vietnam some 40 years after national reunification as palimpsest and portent to a number of sociopolitical negotiations and cultural upheavals.”

Phuong will consider, for example, how the Internet and related digital technologies influence urban youths’ civic life, communal ties and social imaginations, and how these so-called new media intersect and interact with older forms of media at particular conjunctures to produce new values, beliefs and rituals.

Based on 28 months of fieldwork, Phuong will map networks of artists, activists, writers, entrepreneurs, and ordinary youth to examine how their engagements with media exemplify a notion of play – a repertoire of everyday tactics that probe the limits of censorship for new possibilities vis-à-vis disciplinary structures.

His book will posit Vietnamese youth as a potential force for change and show how their multifaceted engagements with old and new media through play can challenge, buttress and mystify authority under shifting circumstances.

Congratulations, Dr. Phuong. We look forward to learning more about this exciting project as it evolves!