Minh-Ha T. Pham
Professor, Media Studies
PRATT INSTITUTE
Minh-Ha T. Pham is a Professor of Media Studies. Her research investigates the intersection of gender, race, and labor under global and digital capitalism. She’s published two books and more than 40 articles focusing on the racial and gender patterns of increasingly casualized fashion work under global and digital capitalism.
Her first book, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging (Duke University Press 2015) examines the rise of an elite class of Asian fashion bloggers in the mid 2000s to the 2010s. The book demonstrates why and how this new category of informal and unwaged Asian fashion worker was not a departure from but a function of global fashion’s racial logics.
Her second book, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property (Duke UP 2022), investigates the fashion industry’s reliance on social media users to do the work of monitoring the global fashion market for fashion knockoffs. Analyzing a wide range of fashion trials by social media and the categories of creativity and copying that organize them, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things shows how practices intended to make the fashion market more ethical are ultimately reinforcing western property logics and the west’s stranglehold of the global fashion market.
Her current project continues to examine ethnic women’s labor – this time, focusing on Vietnamese American bakeries in New York City.
Minh-Ha received a BA in English at University of California, Santa Barbara (1995) and earned a PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Visual Studies at University of California, Berkeley (2007).
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