SCA Research Seminar - The digital speed of care: Temporalities of online petty trading in Vietnam

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/心 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.