Sharing Stories, Sharing Trust: Making sense of transnational information and diasporic memories

Abstract

Mis- and disinformation or problematic information research, its interventions, and its resulting policy-making initiatives have overwhelmingly emphasized rapid response methods that center Western Anglo-centric, English-first information. This form of mainstream problematic information research further marginalizes and fails communities, such as the Vietnamese diaspora, because data-driven and monolingual approaches are prioritized over historical and affective contexts. These studies lack historical and contextual analysis of information finding, sharing, and trusting behaviors. Thus, there is no common ground towards a single truth from this gap in our ability to address problematic information in communities that have historically experienced systematic propaganda and access barriers. The fields of information science, design, and science, technology, and society are in the nascent stages when contending with long histories of harm that ongoing propaganda and media manipulation have impacted on communities who have been historically marginalized. Problematic information in diaspora communities is a historical and affective problem, not primarily a technical one, and requires community-centered archival and design interventions. To address these grand challenges, I situate this research in the context of the Vietnamese diaspora as an example of a population of people who are refugees and immigrants due to many years of imperialism and colonialism. I developed four primary research areas to investigate the ways people among this diaspora find, receive, share, and come to trust information between generations within their communities. First, in chapter three, I developed a community-based participatory co-design methodological practice to address the often buried affect and trauma that impacts the relationships between community memory, misleading content, and polarization of trust within communities. I argue for libraries, archives, and media producers to adopt community-based participatory design (CBPD) practices that develop intergenerational infrastructures of trust and integration of pluriversal temporal affects of community members over the popularized universality of technology and design. This will provide designers, researchers, and policy makers with affective tools towards cultural empowerment in the face of problematic information and increasing distrust in institutions. The second portion of this research enhances archival studies through a diasporic framework by drawing together, for the first time, the intersections of social and political economies from critical refugee studies, intergenerational collective memory, and transnational information networks. By using information objects and memory narratives about each object as the sites of research, I explore an affective intervention that activates archives and cultural heritage institutions within diasporas’ practices as they preserve, make sense of, return to (home), and imagine futures within their collective memories. Existing scholarship in archival studies that address immigrants, refugees, or diaspora lead with frameworks of human rights, humanitarian aid, and archival organization that centers the Archives, within the mainstream Western institutional practice, as the primary system to legitimize a marginalized communities’ memories and officialize records. My research pushes what constitutes the authenticity of memories as records, in that they can be validated by intangible mediums and provenances which are driven by community members’ collective feeling and sensing as they attempt to preserve and evolve their cultural practices. Scholars have also theorized ethnic, diasporic, and identity-based archives but these lack intergenerational and temporal contexts of transnational information networks that impact the contexts which information within the records remain or evolve in its trustworthiness, accuracy, and relevance. As community members practice agency in preserving their own stories and making sense of their diasporic stories in a communal setting, forefronting affect as a proactive practice suggests a long-term enactment to empower people to become articulate and transparent while sharing their histories that have been historically misinterpreted, excluded, or annihilated. Together, I complicate and intersect problematic information and archives studies as areas of research to emphasize historical and present-day transnational power dynamics that impact the ongoing spread and rise of problematic information within immigrant, refugee, non-English, and multilingual communities. Through the interdisciplinary intersections of American ethnic studies, critical immigrant and refugee studies, transnational information networks, and socio-technical systems can address a past, present, and future of growing diasporic communities making sense of their long histories riddled with misleading content, propaganda, and media manipulation.