Photo credit: Huynh Phong

The digital speed of care: Temporalities of online petty trading in Vietnam

Presented by: Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu

Date: Friday 24 May 2024
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Location: Online via Zoom and in-person at the SCA Writer's Studio (Level 6, Michie Building)


Abstract

What happens to the mother’s heart when it runs at the digital speed? In this presentation, I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam to analyse the affective load that caregivers bring with them when they go online to make a living.

The presentation is set against the context of pervasive social anxiety in Vietnam regarding high levels of chemicals in food. This concern has driven the rapid expansion of an online marketplace for “clean food” where sellers are mainly young mothers. These online petty traders embody a particular kind of gendered stuckness, defined by the entrapment between the inevitable hope for their babies’ “slow growth” and the immanent anxiety of “slow death” from food on top of unstable livelihoods.

Beyond the critique of digital precarization, this presentation draws from East Asian language and philosophy to explore the existential condition ofa mother’s “heart” (tâm/tim in Vietnamese, xin/ in Chinese) when engaging in digital transactions. The “heart”, or tâm, is a radically sensitive faculty of affect responsible for pulling together a living self against unsettling forces from the outer world. Putting tâm to work on digital platforms means forcing it into a constant combating mode against the assailing foreignness of the digital speed. Oscillating between the swift pace of digital transactions and the chronic demands of caregiving, the mother's heart is placed in a state of schizophrenic endurance.


Presenter

Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu is a DECRA Research Fellow at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. Her DECRA project she explores the contesting temporalities, or the lived experience of time, on the ground of digital development in Vietnam.


 

About Research Seminar and Workshop Series

 


School of Communication and Arts Research Seminar Series

The research seminar and workshop series occur each semester, each with a different topic and guest speaker from UQ or otherwise.

Friday, 16 August
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the
SCA Writer's Studio
(Level 6, Michie)

Archives: A Knowledge Café on Ways of Knowing, Seeing, Being, and Accessing

A conversation hosted by Kate Newey, Bernadette Cochrane, Madelyn Coupe, and Hannah Mason

Friday, 23 August
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at 09-738

Dispatches from Trump-World: Preppers, Climate Disasters and a Front Row Seat the 2024 Republican National Convention

Dr Tom Doig

Friday, 30August
12-1pm

Indigenising the Curriculum Pedagogy JamDr Amelia Barikin and Prof. Anna Johnston

Friday, 13 September
12-1pm

Assessment Security Pedagogy JamDr Amelia Barikin and Dr Maureen Engel

Friday, 20 September
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the
SCA Writer's Studio
(Level 6, Michie)

Upside Down: Adaptation and Digital Affordances in Stranger Things

Dr Bernadette Cochrane

Friday, 11 October
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the
SCA Writer's Studio
(Level 6, Michie)

Linking research, teaching and engagement – the PEATLI project

A.Prof Elske van de Fliert

 

Venue

Online via Zoom and in-person at the SCA Writer's Studio (Level 6, Michie Building)