Soziologie

» Veröffentlicht am 22. August 2024

Special Issue Published: "Welfare in Crisis: Labor and Social Protection in the Global South"

A new special issue titled "Welfare in Crisis: Labor and Social Protection in the Global South" has been published in the Journal of Labor and Society (Brill). Edited by Jake Lin, Dennis Arnold, and Minh T.N. Nguyen, the issue includes contributions from Rebecca Prentice, Mahmudul H. Sumon, André Thiemann, Angie Ngọc Trần, Rano Turaeva, and Chioma Joyce Onukogu.

» Veröffentlicht am 7. August 2024

Talk: "Transnational Mobility, Kinship and Aspiration for the Good Life in Rural Central Vietnam"

On August 15th, Minh Nguyen gives a talk, titled "Transnational Mobility, Kinship and Aspiration for the Good Life in Rural Central Vietnam", at the National University of Singapore.

» Veröffentlicht am 5. August 2024

Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in the Global South - Special Issue published

Global Social Policy has just published a new special issue edited by Minh T.N. Nguyen, Jingyu Mao and Helle Rydstrom titled "Reconfiguring labour and welfare in the Global South: How the social question is framed as market participation". The issue features eight analyses (mostly ethnographic analyses) and three commentaries addressing a range of Global South contexts of labour and welfare restructuring: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/GSP/current.

» Veröffentlicht am 27. Mai 2024

Minh Nguyen awarded Isaac Manasseh Meyer Fellowship by National University of Singapore

Professor Minh Nguyen has been awarded one of National University of Singapore (NUS)’s Isaac Manasseh Meyer fellowships at the Faculty of Arts and Social Science this year. The research will co-fund her stay at the faculty in August 2024 as part of the program of the research project WelfareStruggles (ERC No 803614). Details of the fellowship can be found here. During her fellowship, Prof. Nguyen will co-convene the writing workshop Care, Welfare, Government in Asia’s Market Economy with Prof. Vineeta Sinha of NUS and give a lecture titled Transnational Mobility, Kinship and Aspiration for the Good Life in Rural Central Vietnam.

» Veröffentlicht am 27. Mai 2024

Care, Welfare, Government in Asia’s Market Economies – Writing Workshop in Collaboration between Bielefeld University and National University of Singapore

Between August 5th and 8th, the writing workshop Care, Welfare, Government in Asia’s Market Economy for early-career anthropologists and sociologists will take place at the National University of Singapore.

The workshop is co-convened by Prof. Minh Nguyen of Bielefeld University and Professor Vineeta Sinha of National University of Singapore, with further discussant inputs by Professor Anne-Christine Trémon (École des hautes études en sciences sociales - EHESS) and Dr. Megha Amrith (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity).

This is an activity of the ERC funded research project WelfareStruggles and a part of the long-standing collaboration between colleages based at Bielefeld University’s Faculty of Sociology and NUS’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology. See Call for Paper and program for details.

» Veröffentlicht am 22. April 2024

Understanding Asia: Ideas, Democracy and Rights

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. 

» Veröffentlicht am 15. April 2024

Recent publications of AG Social Anthropology

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.

» Veröffentlicht am 2. April 2024

Oliver Flügel-Martinsen ist neuer Dekan der Fakultät

Mit Beginn des Sommersemesters 2024 ist Oliver Flügel-Martinsen neuer Dekan der Fakultät für Soziologie. Er ist seit 2010 Professor für Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte an der Fakultät. Er löst damit Andreas Vasilache nach fünf Semestern als Dekan ab. Neue Prodekanin ist Minh Nguyen, die Ruth Ayass ablöst.

» Veröffentlicht am 28. März 2024

Interview: ‘Out of the Spheres of the Private and the Moral’

Prior to the concluding conference of the ERC-funded 'WelfareStruggles' project, Minh Nguyen gave an interview to Manuela Lenzen from ZiF (Center for Interdisciplinary Research). The interview can be found here.

» Veröffentlicht am 25. März 2024

Final Conference ERC projet WelfareStruggles: »The Politics of Care under Market Socialism«

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.

» Veröffentlicht am 4. März 2024

The good life in late-socialist Asia: Aspirations, politics, and possibilities - publication announcement

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

» Veröffentlicht am 29. September 2023

Recent publications from AG Social Anthropology

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).

» Veröffentlicht am 21. September 2023

New Frontiers of Research on Welfare in the Global South - Ring Lecture Series

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. 

» Veröffentlicht am 7. September 2023

Hindu Deities on ‘World Tour’: Unbounded Efficacies - First publication of Bielefeld Anthropological Papers on Issues of the Global World (BAPGW)

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.

» Veröffentlicht am 30. August 2023

Rural Life in Late Socialism - Open-Access publication

»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.