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
Digitizing Ancient and Modern Refugees (Spring 2024)
This course examines refugeehood through the literary and material record, with a focus on the ancient Greco-Roman world and the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora. Drawing on Critical Refugee Studies, we investigate the politics of forced displacement in ancient and modern contexts, especially in relation to race and ethnicity, and colonialism and imperialism. We 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 gain hands-on experience working with a selection of digitized artifacts from the Vietnamese refugee community and have the opportunity to explore different digital archaeology methodologies. Throughout the course, students work towards building their final group project: a digital exhibit featuring refugee material culture from the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora alongside those from the ancient Greco-Roman world with the goal of shedding light on contemporary refugee issues.
A new iteration of this course is under development with the support of a grant from the Mellon Data & Social Justice Curricular Initiatives Program. The course syllabus will be made public once it is available.
Sample Student Exhibits
Click on these exhibits to check them out!
Spring 2024
