Dr. Xuan Thuy Nguyen is an interdisciplinary researcher, teacher, critical thinker, and community-based learner. She finds gratification in mentoring students from diverse backgrounds, activists, and community-organizers to build decolonial spaces for disability studies and activism within transnational contexts. Her research focuses on the use of participatory arts-based methods to engage women and girls with disabilities in the global South.
She is currently the Project Director of a SSHRC’s Partnership Development Project entitled “Learning with and from the global South: Opportunities for engaging girls & young women with disabilities across Southern spaces” (ENGAGE) [2021-2024]. In collaboration with academics, activists, and Disabled People’s Organizations in India, South Africa, and Vietnam, her project examines how young women and girls with disabilities and partners in the global South can engage and build strong leadership as opportunities for decolonial and inclusive knowledge production.
She is also the Principal Investigator of a collaborative research project, Transforming Disability Knowledge, Research, and Activism, (TDKRA) [2016-20] and a co-investigator of a Partnership Project, entitled Engendering Disability-Inclusive Development (EDID) [2020-27]. She most recently received an International Research SEED Grant (IRSG), “Towards inclusive, collaborative, and decolonial relationships with the global South: Lessons learned from a global North/South partnership project”[XN1] [2021-2023] to support collaborative, decolonial, and sustainable partnership projects. Her work has been published in many peer-review journals such as Disability & Society, Disability and the Global South, Global Studies of Childhood, Foucault Studies, and Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is author of The Journey to Inclusion (2015, Sense/Brill Publishers).