The Understanding Asia Colloquium Series continues. This semester's topic is »Ideas, Democracy and Rights«. The first talk, titled »Public Shadows: The Social Life of Shade in Saigon«, will be presented by Eric Harms (Yale University) on April 29th, from 16:15 to 17:45, in X-C3-107. For more information and registration, click here.

The colloquium series is a joint cooperation of four working groups (WG Missbach; WG Nguyen; WG Winkel and WG Vasilache) of the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University. 

Nguyen, M., Wilcox, P., & Lin, J. N. (2024). Guest Editors’ Introduction. The Good Life in Late Socialist Asia: Aspirations, Politics and Possibibilities. Positions Asia Crituque: 32, 1-25.

Tran, H., & Sandhya, A. S. (2024). Cutting down and stocking up: how migration brokers negotiate mobility disruptions. Applied Mobilities: 1-17.

Wilcox, P. (2024). (Not) on your bike: How Urban Laos doesn't move. Suomen Antropoloji: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society: 48(1), 26-42.

We are pleased to announce the publication of the positions:asia critique special issue “The good life in late-socialist Asia: Aspirations, politics, and possibilities” guest edited by Minh T. N. Nguyen, Phill Wilcox and Jake Lin: https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/issue. Below is the table of content of the issue.

This special issue emerged from a conference under the same title in Bielefeld in 2019 from which another special issue has been published by the European Journal of  East Asian Studies, under the title “Rural Life in Late Socialism: Politics of Development and Imaginaries of the Future”: https://brill.com/view/journals/ejea/20/1/ejea.20.issue-1.xml, which later became an open-access book in updated form with Brill: https://brill.com/display/title/63621?rskey=s2AkuQ&result=4

Best regards,

The good life in late-socialist Asia: aspirations, politics, and possibilities

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Minh T. N. Nguyen; Phill Wilcox; Jake Lin

Articles

Plugged into the Good Life: Living Electrically through the Ages in Urban Vietnam

Kirsten W. Endres

Eating Out in Contemporary Hanoi: Middle-Class Food Practices, Capitalist Transformations, and the Late-Socialist Good Life

Arve Hansen

Not before Twenty-Five: Contesting Marriage and Looking for the Good Life in Contemporary Urban China

Roberta Zavoretti

Dancing and Rapping the Good Life: Sharing Aspirations and Values in Vietnamese Hip-Hop

Sandra Kurfürst

Philanthropy Fever from Below: On the Possibilities of a Good Life in Late-Socialist China

Jiazhi Fengjiang

The Good Life as the Green Life: Digital Environmentalism and Ecological Consciousness in China

Charlotte Bruckermann

Protecting the Body, Living the Good Life: Negotiating Health in Rural Lowland Laos

Elizabeth M. Elliott

Summer Happiness: Performing the Good Life in a Tibetan Town

Fan Zhang

Spirits with Morality: Social Criticism and Notions of a Good Life in Laos through the Bangbot Imaginary

Michael Kleinod-Freudenberg; Sypha Chanthavong

Afterword: What Good Life, and Why Now?

Li Zhang

Behrens, Julia. 2023. “Mediating Resistance: An NGO, a Community and the Struggle for a Different Sustainable Development in Vietnam“. Bielefeld Anthropological Papers on Issues of the Global World. Nr. 3. https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/soziologie/fakultaet/arbeitsbereiche/ab6/ag_sozialanthropologie/bielefeld-anthropological/published-papers/3-mediating-resistance-an/.

Lin, Jake; Arnold, Dennis and Minh T.N. Nguyen. 2023. “Welfare in Crisis: Labor and Social Protection in the Global South“. Journal of Labor and Society. Brill. https://brill.com/view/journals/jlso/aop/article-10.1163-24714607-bja10128/article-10.1163-24714607-bja10128.xml?ebody=article%20details

Luong, Ngoc M. and Minh T.N. Nguyen. 2023. “Factory worker welfare and the commodification of labour in market socialist Vietnam: Debates on overtime work in the revised labour code“. Global Social Policy.

Nguyen, Minh T.N. 2023. “The entrepreneurial self of market socialism“ HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 13(2). https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/1784.

Wilcox, Phill. 2023. “Negotiating External Powers in Everyday Life: Congolese Perspectives on Hedging Chinese and French Influences“. Bielefeld Anthropological Papers on Issues of the Global World. Nr. 4. https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/soziologie/fakultaet/arbeitsbereiche/ab6/ag_sozialanthropologie/bielefeld-anthropological/published-papers/4-negotiating-external-po/.

On October 10th he Understanding Asia Colloquium Series continues with th screening of the documentary `And Miles to Go Before I Sleep´. It will take place from 16 to 18 in X-E-0-226 and can also be joined via Zoom. For registration click here.  

Nguyen Quoc Phi was an undocumented migrant worker, or a ‘runaway’, in northern Taiwan before he was shot nine times by the police and left unattended by the paramedics on 31 August 2017. What made him ‘run away’ from his factory work? How did he find jobs in various construction sites? Why did he start taking drugs? Was he an imperfect victim? These are straightforward questions leading to complicated answers. The award-winning documentary And Miles to Go before I Sleep brings to the fore the nakedness of discrimination and the challenges to humanity if we choose to be bystanders indifferent to inequality and injustice. 

The content of the documentary includes violent scenes, and the topics under discussion may be stressful for some viewers. 

Film length: 90 Minutes

Q&A and Knowledge Co-Production Activity: 30 Minutes

Director: Tsai Tsung-lung, National Chung Cheng University

Tsai Tsung-Lung is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communications of the National Chung Cheng University and works as an independent documentary producer and director. He takes a humanist approach to his works concerning human rights, environmental crisis, and cultural diversities. Tsai endeavored to promote the visibility and understanding of documentaries and, as a lecturer, has dedicated to training filmmaking amongst students and amateurs. Some of his recent works were collaborated with his Vietnamese spouse, Nguyen Kim Hong, concentrating on migrant spouses and workers in Taiwan, such as See You, Lovable Strangers that recorded the hardships of Vietnamese farmworkers. His film My Imported Wife was archived in the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. Sunflower Occupation, the latest film produced by Tsai, was selected in the New Asian Currents item in the 2015 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

Coordinator: Dr. Isabelle Cockel (University of Portsmouth) and Huy Tran (Bielefeld University) 

Dr. Isabelle Cockel is Senior Lecturer in East Asian and International Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth. Her research focuses on labour and marriage migration in East Asia. She is particularly interested in how the state instrumentalises immigration for political economic interests. Her publications focus on sovereignty, citizenship, gender, activism, and irregular work in the informal labour market. Enacting upon her commitment to academic activism, she utilises academic blogs to raise public awareness of inequality and injustice embedded in labour migration. 

Dr. Huy Tran is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University. His research pays attention to the several patterns and aspects of transnational migration in East Asia and the Vietnamese migrant community in Japan. He also has an interest on the sexual and gender dimension in transnational migration, migration brokerage and the migration industry. 

Nguyen, Minh T. N., and Lan Wei. 2023. “Peasant Traders, Migrant Workers and ‘Supermarkets’: Low-Cost Provisions and the Reproduction of Migrant Labor in China.” Economic Anthropology 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12292.

Wilcox, Phill, Rigg, Jonathan, & Nguyen, Minh T. N. 2023. Rural Life in Late Socialism: Politics of Development and Imaginaries of the Future. Brill.   https://brill.com/display/title/63621?rskey=s2AkuQ&result=4.

Mao, Jingyu. 2023. “Doing Ethnicity—Multi-layered Ethnic Scripts in Contemporary China“. The China Quarterly 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741023000681.

Mao, Jingyu. 2023. “Bringing emotional reflexivity and emotional regime to understanding ‘the hukou puzzle’ in contemporary China. Emotions and Society“. https://doi.org/10.1332/263169021X16731871958851 (published online ahead of print 2023).

Mao, Jingyu. & Yan, Zhu. 2023. “Friends are those who can help you out: unpacking the understandings and experiences of friendships among young migrant workers in China“. Families, Relationships and Societies. XX(XX): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1332/204674321X16770752617895 (published online ahead of print 2023).

Lin, Jake. & Mao, Jingyu. 2023. “More equitable fiscal systems are needed to improve welfare provision for migrant workers in China and Vietnam“. Melbourne Asia Review. Edition 14. https://doi.org/10.37839/MAR2652-550X14.13 (Equal authorship).

The Understanding Asia Colloquium Series 2023 continues on June 14th from 16:15 to 17:45 in X-E0-200. The lecture is titled »Eldercare as Recognition in the Aftermath of Dutch Colonialism« and will be held by Olivia Killias from University of Zurich. 

You can join us in person or via Zoom. Click here for registration.