Meghan Nguyen

Meghan Nguyen (she/they) is a senior studying sociology, journalism and African and African Diaspora Studies with a BDP certificate in Human Rights/Social Justice. Her research interests include media, cultural and digital studies, surveillance, race and abolition. Her few years of undergraduate study and service have involved an internship at the UT Center for Community Engagement, where she participated in community outreach and cultural preservation efforts for vulnerable Austin communities, and at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, where she assisted with policy analysis and research that helped support Black communities. She is a Moody Media Scholar for Social Change, and a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. Currently, she is working on an honors thesis about the media coverage and circulation of racist violence and death in the U.S, the ease and casualness with which such scenes are usually reiterated and circulated, and the consequences of this routine display. At its most expansive, her interdisciplinary work asks how contemporary and emerging digital technologies and media transform and are transformed by the social world in which they are embedded and engaged. Passionate about community organizing/activism, storytelling and social justice, she envisions her academic and professional trajectory as a quest to understand, empower and uplift marginalized voices and to examine the systems that seek to ignore and silence them.