Minh-Ha Pham

Minh-Ha T. Pham is 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 recent published articles include:

• “A World Without Sweatshops: Abolition Not Reform” in Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice edited by Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers, and Brooke Lober for Haymarket Books in 2022
• “To Slow Down Death,” in a special issue of Social Text on the theme “Sociality at the End of the World” in 2022
• “‘How to Make a Mask,’ or the Racialized Value of Women’s Work in the COVID-19 Era” in the journal Feminist Studies in 2020

Her current project continues to examine ethnic women’s labor – this time, focusing on Vietnamese American bakeries in New York City.

PhD, 2007, Ethnic Studies/Asian American Studies, UC Berkeley

• Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property (Duke University Press 2022)
• Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging (Duke University Press 2015)
• “A World Without Sweatshops: Abolition Not Reform” in Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice (Haymarket Books, 2022).
• “‘How to Make a Mask’: Quarantine Feminism and Global Supply Chains,” Feminist Studies 46.2 (2020)
• “As Fashion Lines are Praised for Making Masks, Don’t Ignore Garment Workers,” Truthout.org (2020)
• “How to Fix the Fashion Industry’s Racism,” The New Republic (2019)
• “Stories the Fashion Media Won’t Tell,” The Nation (2019)