Teaching and Research Fields

Critical fashion studies, Asian American visual studies, gender and women studies, comparative ethnic studies, creative and political economies, affect studies, feminist media studies, digital humanities, techno-cultural studies, and surveillance and society studies.

Current Research

I'm completing my first book on the politics of visibility and representation in the context of surveillance culture. Focusing on fashion, a cultural site and source of image-saturation, I examine the ways in which new fashion technologies that draw on user-generated biometric data, locational tracking, individual purchase behavior monitoring, among other surveillance and dataveillance technologies are changing the politics and practices of cultural visibility for those historically rendered un-visible by fashion's normative whiteness. Drawing on an array of fashion's new technologies from blogs to virtual fitting rooms, I consider how such technologies monitor and manage the production of racial, gender, consumer, and civic subjectivities as well as the ways in which these surveillance practices and technologies are being repurposed in unintended ways. My book urges for a reconsideration of racial visibility under consumer surveillance culture in which the operations and forms of surveillance are not merely "top-down" but also - and increasingly - multidirectional, interactive, and participatory.

Publications

As well as the following publications, my research has appeared in media sites including The Guardian (UK), New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Racialicious, Jezebel, and the Business of Fashion.

Refereed Articles

“Asian 2.0: Race and Style in the Fashion Blogosphere” (in progress)

“‘Susie Bubble Is a Sign of the Times’: The Embodiment of Success in the Web 2.0 Economy” Feminist Media Studies 13.2 (June 2013) (online publication scheduled for July 2012)

“Listening as a Labor of Love: Commerce, Community, and Little Saigon Radio,” positions: east asia cultures critique (forthcoming)

“Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 76 26.1 (April 2011): 1-37.

“The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terrorism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36.2 (2011): 385-410.

“The Asian Invasion (of Multiculturalism) in Hollywood,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 32.3. (2004): 121-131.

Book Chapters

“Wicked (Cool) Body Scanners: The Pleasure and Politics of Surveillance” (in progress)

“The Asian Invasion (of Multiculturalism) in Hollywood,” Hollywood’s America: Twentieth Century America Through Film eds. Steven Mintz and Randy W. Roberts (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2010): 340-353. (republished)

“The Asian Invasion (of Multiculturalism) in Hollywood,” Common Culture: Reading and Writing about American Popular Culture, 4^th Edition eds. Michael Petracca and Madeleine Sorapure (Prentice Hall 2006). (republished)

“Re-Writing Home,” This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Vision for Transformation eds. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002): 176-180.

Recent Invited Talks

“Writing Fashion, From Book to Blog,” The Humanities Initiative, New York University

“Blog Ambition: Race, Gender, and Fashion Blogs,” Parsons the New School for Design

Interactive Online Projects

Threadbared, a co-authored research blog on the politics of fashion, style, and beauty, which receives approximately 22,300 monthly page views. Threadbared has been cited in numerous popular and academic publications including Chronicle of Higher Education, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, Salon.com, the Museum at FIT blog, Worn Fashion Journal, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and the journal of English Studies in Canada.

Of Another Fashion, a crowdsourced digital photo archive of the not-quite-hidden but too often neglected fashion histories of U.S. women of color. The blog receives about 50,000 monthly page views and has more than 25,000 subscribers. It’s been featured on NPR, The Root, Ms. magazine, Colorlines magazine, Etsy blog, Youth Radio, and AOL’s Black Voices on Style.

Minh-Ha Pham Asian American Program Faculty Page: http://www.aasp.cornell.edu/faculty.php#mpham
Asian American Studies Program: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/asianam/

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