Teach/Learn/Do
Decolonial Work
Featured Student Projects
These zines attempt to reflect on the tension between Indigenous peoples and their cosmological ways of knowing and western astronomers and their studies, systems, and accompanying infrastructures. The first zines focus on the foundational theory of “astro-colonialism” and the second, a current event that exemplifies this aforementioned tension (the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawai’i).
Our interactive multimodal website invites viewers to grapple with the culinary and etiquette shifts that paralleled the changing power structures during the colonial period as well as their effects on cuisine in the present day.
We seek to visualize this shift to modernity and understand the societal values that have surfaced in light of this new era of individualism. Specifically, how do market trends reflect changing attitudes, norms, and values in colonial society?
Who am I?
Cindy Nguyen is assistant professor in the Information Studies department and Digital Humanities program at University of California, Los Angeles. Her forthcoming book “Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam,” (UC Press, Open Access January 2026) reveals how the library reading room became a space of urban sociability, cultural imperialism, and self-directed education. Her digital humanities work bridges computation, critical data analysis, and histories of the book and information. Nguyen is also a public scholar and community artist exploring themes of memory, translation, and migration.
A question
How can digital methods reveal and critique structures of power and forms of hegemonic representation in the historic and cultural record? How can a digital humanities research framework grounded in critique-creation contribute to decolonial work and reparative justice?
A commitment
I seek to create systems of reciprocity, care, creation, and transparency.
Scholar cindyanguyen.com
Book bibliotactics.com
Community Artist mis-reading.com
Featured Research Projects by Cindy Nguyen
Intersectional practices of power in colonial institutions of libraries; a history of the colonial public in Vietnam [Forthcoming Book]
Speaking Gender & Tradition
Care across Vietnamese Generations and Diaspora; Colonial representations of Female Labor (Digital Humanities & Book History)
RADICAL KINSHIP
SLOWNESS
PLAY
feminist experiment of public scholarship and community engagement
A pedagogy informed research method of radical reimagining historical social worlds – Virtual Angkor and Vietnamese Decolonial Data
