Meet Center Graduate Affiliate Thao P. Nguyen in a New Q&A Interview
Thao P. Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant, is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Boston University. She is also the UX Design Program Manager at BU Spark! and a research affiliate at the Center for Anti-racist Research and Precarity Lab. Her research interests center on gender and sexuality, sociology of labor, economic sociology, and digital sociology. She also writes about love, sex and desire in academic and pop-culture formats. She believes that sociological research should contribute to social change. Learn more about Nguyen below in a Q&A interview with CISS Communications Manager Lily Belisle.
What made you decide to be a social scientist/ why does social science matter to you?
Growing up, my first exposure to social science was through the lens of gender inequality. During the time I was applying to college, the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder had just occurred. This was a powerful shock for me, and sparked a passion to fight against gender and social inequality. When I was in college, this inspired me to study global studies with a focus in gender studies. I had the opportunity to take a wide range of social science classes—political science, international relations, political relations—and started to become good at them. While in my freshman year of college, I had initially planned on pursuing chemistry, I thought I could better thrive in social science, so I opted for this path. Social science supports critical thinking, provides a toolkit with which we can understand social issues and analyze the underlying structures that drive inequality. Social science also allows us to understand why the social world exists in the way that it does.
Can you tell us about a recent research project that you’re excited about?
Right now, I am currently working on multiple papers. First, I am working with Professor Ashley Mears on a project investigating how online content creators game algorithms to make themselves more visible and avoid platform censorship and surveillance. Second, I have a solo-authored paper that aims to theorize sexual labor in a new way. Historically, there has been a very specific framework through which sexual labor has been understood, however social media and technology have made for a much more nuanced reality. I try to move away from viewing intimate labor as empowering or oppressive which is rooted in the “feminist sex wars.” Instead, I move to a different framework that considers the labor aspect of sex work and the different factors at play. More specifically, I focus on indie porn workers.
What is the best piece of professional advice you ever received?
The best professional advice I have received emphasizes the importance of building relationships with professors and mentors who align with your academic visions. Academia can be very toxic, and it is incredibly valuable to identify mentors who can see through this toxicity and academic games, who acknowledge the hidden curriculum, and can help you navigate through the hidden curriculum while refusing to buy into the system. It is crucial to identify the people who empower you to push back and allow you to be who you want to be and not who they want you to be.
Tell us a surprising fact about yourself.
When I was in my undergraduate college years, I worked for a Christian faith-based non-profit anti-human trafficking organization in Lynchburg, Virginia. For one of their fundraising events, they had asked me? to dress like a sex worker in Bangkok, Thailand’s Red-Light Districts in order to evoke emotions from their donors. At the time, I was quite naive and oblivious to the racialized and gendered dynamics present in anti-human trafficking work, but looking back the organization was incredibly problematic, and their work reinforced settler colonialism and imperialism.