Anthropology & Fiction-Making
Based in the bloomscapes of Da Lat, Vietnam, Uyen's research is broadly concerned with collective & vernacular memory, spatial inheritances, and the historical labors that produce spaces of pleasure, and has received support from Fulbright, Dartmouth, and Yale. Her work is interested in troubling textual and ocular ways of knowing in order to consider:
Labors of rest and repose
Botanical governance & vernacular botany
Place memory, intimacies, attachments
Beauty & enjoyment “after” empire
In the past, her research explored HCMC/Saigon at the intersection of memory, crumbling apartment blocks, and postwar life. Her undergraduate senior honors thesis, Being With, written amid Covid-19 lockdowns in Vietnam, engaged café apartments in Saigon and a collaborative form of digital ethnography to explore how memories of the city are simultaneously shaping and being shaped by its Gen Zers.
