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.

From March 26th to March 27th the final conference of the ERC funded project WelfareStruggles titled »The Politics of Care under Market Socialism: Labour Mobility, Global Capital and Changing Welfare System in Vietnam and China« will take place at ZiF. For more information click here.

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

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).

Whereas the welfare state in the Global North has been a response to industrialization and the rise of the workers' movement, the Global South is characterized by different legacies of social policy that stem, among others, from their colonial histories and the influence of transnational actors such as international organizations. In recent decades, social policies have further expanded across the Global South, as international organizations such as the ILO have (re-)discovered global poverty and the widespread lack of social protection for certain groups in the so-called "developing world" as intertwined. In light of far-reaching societal transformations, there have certainly been large-scale social policy developments in these countries in recent decades.

This lecture series hosts eminent scholars of social policy, anthropology, development and related fields, who will present their work on new frontiers of research on welfare in the Global South. Overall, the lecture series enquires into the varying trajectories of welfare transformations in the Global South and their political, historical and social contexts.

All lectures, with exception of the first, will be hybrid events. To register to the Zoom events click here. 

The first paper of the new working paper series »Bielefeld Anthropological Papers on Issues of the Global World (BAPGW)« has been published. 

BAPGW features innovative theoretical and empirical analyses by scholars working on socio-cultural, economic and political issues of global implications in diverse contexts whose works are anthropologically and ethnographically oriented. The series provides a platform for staff members, guest speakers and visiting scholars of Bielefeld University's Faculty of Sociology to disseminate their findings, gather feedback and initiate discussion on their ongoing works. The series is edited and sponsored by the Faculty’s Department for Sociology of Transnationalisation and Social Anthropology.

The paper by Vineeta Sinha (University of Singapore) is titled »Hindu Deities on ‘World Tour’: Unbounded Efficacies«. 

For more information and access click here.

»Rural Life in Late Socialism: Politics of Development and Imaginaries of the Future« has been published by Brill as an open-access book. This is an updated version of the special issue with the same name, which was edited by Phill Wilcox, Jonathan Rigg, and Minh Nguyen. Catrina Schwendender contributed a chapter titled »A Good Life Postponed: Working in the Countryside, Retiring in the City in Contemporary China.« For more information and open access click here.

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.

The Understanding Asia Colloquium Series continues. Our first guest this semester is Dirk Tomsa from La Trobe University Melbourne. His talk is titled "Democratic Regression and Environmental Politics in Indonesia" and will take place on 12.04. from 16:15 to 17:45 in X-E0-200. 

Click here for more information.

The organized panels from Professor Minh Nguyen and Huy Tran (postdoctoral fellow) have been accepted to the AAS in Asia 2023 Conference. The conference will take place from 24th to 27th June 2023 in Daegu, South Korea, with a focus on "Asia in Motion: Memory, Preservation and Documentation". The organized panels from Tran and Nguyen takes on the theme of "The Politics of Aspiration and Transnational Migration in Post-reform Vietnam" and consists of two consecutive sessions. They will feature up-to-date contributions that explore both empirically and theoretically the complex tangle of aspiration and transnational mobility and how the politics of aspiration unfold at various levels in the context of in post-reform Vietnam. 

More details can be found here.

Professor Minh Nguyen and Dr Jingyu Mao will co-convene a panel at ASA (Association of Social Anthropologists) 2023 conference this April at SOAS, London.

Professor Sohini Kar from the London School of Economics will be the discussant.

More details can be found here: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/asa2023/p/12818.