1st Edition

Vietnamese Migrants in Australia and the Global Digital Diaspora Histories of Childhood, Forced Migration, and Belonging

By Anh Nguyen Austen Copyright 2022

    Through oral histories, memoirs, and Facebook posts of Vietnamese adults who entered Australia as children after the Vietnam War (and Vietnamese refugees, war orphans, and children of refugees) this book provides insight into the memories of forced migrant childhoods and histories, as well as the complexities of national and transnational identity and belonging in digital diaspora.

    As war and displacement compounds the need for creating communities and histories for cultural continuity, this book is a history about childhood and migration for the Vietnamese diaspora of refugees, adoptees, and second generation in Australia and their connectedness to a global and digital diaspora. Using Facebook as a digital archive for historical research, Vietnamese Migrants in Australia and the Global Digital Diaspora presents new methods for the study of what Nguyen Austen proposes as a new area of digital diaspora studies for interdisciplinary research about real and digital life in the humanities and social sciences. As a contemporary digital diaspora study of Vietnamese forced child migrants from 1975 to the present, this book contains a mixed-methods historical analysis of the impact of war and displacement on memories of childhood.

    This book presents an innovative history of the national, transnational, digital, and contemporaneous lives of Vietnamese child migrants, which will make a significant contribution to the discourse on transnational childhood, migration, and belonging for refugees and migrants in the twenty-first century.

    Introduction: A Refugee and Digital Diaspora Study Part I: Migration and Digital Diaspora 1. Digital Diaspora: Vietnamese Refugees on Facebook 2. Unaccompanied Minors: Transitional Memories to 'Home' on Facebook Part II: Childhood and Becoming Refugees 3. Gratitude: Vietnamese Boat Children, Journeys, and Rescues 4. Refugee Childhood: Agency, Self Determination, Belonging Part III: Complexities of Real and Digital Belonging 5. Vietnamese Adoptees: Complexities of Belonging 6. Second-Generation Vietnamese: Inheritance of Refugee History  Epilogue: Historical Continuity in Diaspora

    Biography

    Anh Nguyen Austen is an Associate Research Fellow with the Research Centre for Refugees, Migration, and Humanitarian Studies at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences of Australian Catholic University. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College, Harvard Divinity School, and completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne.