To encourage more meaningful interaction with the artifacts, digital exhibits curated by the RMCI team and by students in Dr. Nguyen's courses at UCLA will be featured on this page on a rotating basis.
A large part of RMCI's mission is to provide educational resources that showcase the diversity and complexity of refugee experiences through material culture. We hope that these exhibits will inspire innovative ways to leverage comparative research and digital humanities to teach and learn about refugee histories.
3D Exhibits
Refugee Boat: 7 Day Narrative
This exhibit features a 3D scan of the "Boat of Hope," which departed from Vung Tau, Vietnam on September 4th, 1984 with nine Vietnamese refugees onboard. Click through the exhibit to learn about the refugees' harrowing seven-day journey.
Refugee Artifacts
This exhibit presents a small selection of artifacts made and/or used by Vietnamese refugees. From internal forced displacement in 1954 after Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel to the "re-education" camps and the refugee camps following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, these objects tell the long and complex history of modern Vietnamese refugeehood.
Student Exhibits
Dr. Nguyen teaches a yearly course in the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA that provides students with the opportunity to contribute to the RMCI and to create rotating exhibits for the wider public.
The Course
DH M155/CL M155: Decolonizing Refugee Data From Rome to Vietnam
This course investigate the politics of forced displacement in ancient and modern contexts (with a focus on Greco-Roman antiquity and contemporary Vietnamese history) through the lens of Critical Refugee Studies and with the aid of digital archaeology tools. We move beyond understanding refugee experiences through sensationalized visualizations, dehumanizing statistics and state-centered policies, and instead through refugee narratives and materiality. We will examine how refugees have been discussed, portrayed, and treated, as well as flip the script to explore refugeehood through the perspectives and experiences of refugees themselves. Students will gain hands-on experience working with digitized artifacts from our community partner, the Vietnamese Heritage Museum, as they work towards their final project: digital exhibits that feature the museum’s artifacts alongside those from the ancient Greco-Roman world with a view to helping us better understand refugeehood across space and time.
