M T N Nguyen
Biographic Data
| ID | 58140 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M T N Nguyen |
| GIVEN NAMES | M T N |
| FAMILY NAME | Nguyen |
| SIGNATURE | NGUYEN M T N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bielefeld University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3704-8369 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Reconfiguring labour and welfare in the Global South
This special issue explores the intertwining reconfigurations of labour and welfare in the Global South by bringing together eight empirical studies of different national and transnational contexts and three commentaries. It asks how Global South people and states alike have come to prioritize market logics as guiding principles for welfare systems, moving away from collective risk-pooling towards individual responsibility, and how this reorienta…
"Peasant traders, migrant workers and "supermarkets
This article analyzes the social and spatial dynamics of the mobile trade in low-cost goods by rural people from a mountainous region of China's Zhejiang province and how these interact with the mobility and social reproductive patterns of the rural-urban migrant workers they cater to. Also formally categorized as peasants, the traders not only supply the goods necessary for the maintenance of the workers but also of their spatially divided house…
The entrepreneurial self of market socialism
Casting the self as the primary unit of profit-making and value creation, the entrepreneurial self evolves from neoliberal ideas of self-enterprise and self-development to find ramifications in varying contexts. This article characterizes the entrepreneurial self of market socialism through the case of life insurance agents in Vietnam, where despite deepening marketization, socialist genealogies remain salient alongside cultural frameworks of car…
Welfare in Crisis
Welfare expansion in the global South is partly in response to the social crises caused by neoliberal restructuring since the 1980s, with the 2008 global financial crisis escalating them, and the covid-19 pandemic further exposing the impact on the most precarious working populations. What are the new dynamics of labor struggles against these structural, industrial, and health crises under the expansion of social protection or the lack thereof? H…
Factory worker welfare and the commodification of labour in market socialist Vietnam
State socialist Vietnam formally embraced market reforms in the mid-1980s, and since then advancing marketization under the undisrupted rule of the Communist party. As marketization deepens, the party state’s legitimacy continues to rest on socialist practices of governance, structures of feeling and visions of a class-free society. This political-economic context gives rise to struggles between market and socialist logics over the social questio…
Playing the edge ball
This article analyzes a particular form of everyday politics through the case of land development in a Chinese village. Commonly referred to as edge ball politics ( cabianqiu ), it implies the act of transgressing certain rules or laws and testing the limits of what is socially and legally possible. We found that the state, the village leadership, private developers, and villagers all vie to influence the outcomes of land development in the villa…
Rural Life in Late Socialism
Late socialist countries are transforming faster than ever. Across China, Laos and Vietnam, where market economies coexist with socialist political rhetoric and the Communist party state’s rule, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of imaginaries of the future alongside uncertainty and anxiety. These countries are three of very few living examples that combine capitalist economics with party state politics. Consequently, societal trans…
Portfolios of Social Protection, Labour Mobility and the Rise of Life Insurance in Rural Central Vietnam
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018-19, this article analyses the changing composition of social protection on the ground in rural central Vietnam, including the recent spread of private life insurance among peasant families. The author uses the concept of portfolios of social protection to denote the emergence of an eclectic mix of measures to manage risks and to prepare for the future in the context of intensified perceptions of r…
Beyond the state? The moral turn of development in South East Asia
Derks A, Nguyen M. Introduction. Beyond the state? The moral turn of development in South East Asia. South East Asia Research . 2020;28(1):1-12
Southeast Asian Trajectories of Labour Mobility
Within and across Southeast Asian national borders, there has been a growing circulation of labour, capital, people, and goods. Meanwhile, urbanisation, agrarian changes, and liberal economic restructuring have been drawing a large section of the rural population into mobile economies and trade networks. This special issue explores the linkage between mobility and the growing precaritisation of labour resulting from neoliberalised development pol…
In a “Half-dark, Half-light Zone”
This article discusses the everyday practices of a mobile network of migrant waste traders originating from northern Vietnam, locating them in an expanding urban waste economy spanning across major urban centres. Based on ethnographic research, I explore how the expansion of the network is foregrounded by the traders’ dealing with the precarious nature of waste trading, which is rooted in the social ambiguity of waste and migrants working with wa…
The Caring State? On Rural Welfare Governance in Post-reform Vietnam and China
We make three arguments in this review of the literature on rural welfare governance in Vietnam and China. First, welfare restructuring in these countries has gone through two overlapping processes of contraction and expansion, underlined by changing politics of needs and shifting modes of governance since their shift from state to market socialism. Such politics are the outcome of the Communist party-state’s dual project of legitimation and cont…
Beyond the Global Care Chain
Revisiting the Global Care Chain literature, we reflect on the ways in which care functions as a moral discourse that simultaneously resonates with local people and helps to promote neoliberalization in contexts that are often left out of the literature. We argue that care, both as concept and practice, inflects the broadest moral contradiction, ambivalence and hybridity of our social and political world today. Critiques of inequalities in global…
Trading in broken things
Through their deeply gendered performative and place-making practices, migrant waste traders take part in regenerating and revaluing urban space in Hanoi, Vietnam. Ethnographic research in the city and in their native rural district suggests that these practices are simultaneously strategic and contingent on the waste traders' gender and class positions. This positioning is defined by their marginalization as rural migrants and the social ambigui…
Migration and Care Institutions in Market Socialist Vietnam
Since socialist Vietnam embraced a market economy in the mid-1980s, high population mobility has engendered shifting forms of insecurity in rural livelihoods and family lives. This article discusses how migrant households in a Red River Delta rural district draw on institutions of care beyond family and kinship to deal with such insecurity. These institutions simultaneously respond to local people’s changing needs and aspirations, and attempt to …
Vietnam's Socialist Servants
1. Introduction 2. Live In, Live Out, Live In the Middle of Nowhere: Labour Regimes and Market Structure 3. Power at Work: Between Harmony and Hierarchy 4. Unruly Servants, Erotic Bodies and Cultural Delinquents: The Representation of Domestic Service 5. Needs, Consumption, and Domestic Service 6. Between Work and Home: Boundaries, Connections and Gendered Expectations Chapter 7. Narrating Identity: the Power and Limits of Individual Life Choice …
Fictitious Kinship
This article argues that migrant domestic workers in Hanoi practise a form of fictitious kinship to carve out personal spaces away from their rural home. Biographical narratives of domestic workers who are unusually devoted to forging emotional ties with their employers indicate that they tend to have problematic private lives. Beyond emotional labour, the performance of fictitious kinship entails significant personal investment on the part of wo…
Translocal Householding
This article examines the shifting household organization of care and livelihoods in a community of Vietnam's Red River Delta that has a history of migrating to work in the urban waste trade, and has been doing so increasingly since the socialist country embraced a market economy in the mid-1980s. In Spring District, household care and livelihood activities have been taking place across the city and the countryside for decades, indicating the deg…
Rural-urban migration in Vietnam and China
The transition from state socialism to market socialism in Vietnam and China has been characterized by unprecedented rural-urban migration. We argue that this migration is integral rather than incidental to the gendered reproduction of state and society. A review of the emerging literature on trans-local householding explores the process whereby the reflexive engagement of the state and the household remakes rural-urban differentiation in ways th…
Beyond the Global Care Chain
Revisiting the Global Care Chain literature, we reflect on the ways in which care functions as a moral discourse that simultaneously resonates with local people and helps to promote neoliberalization in contexts that are often left out of the literature. We argue that care, both as concept and practice, inflects the broadest moral contradiction, ambivalence and hybridity of our social and political world today. Critiques of inequalities in global…
Rural-urban migration in Vietnam and China
The transition from state socialism to market socialism in Vietnam and China has been characterized by unprecedented rural-urban migration. We argue that this migration is integral rather than incidental to the gendered reproduction of state and society. A review of the emerging literature on trans-local householding explores the process whereby the reflexive engagement of the state and the household remakes rural-urban differentiation in ways th…
The Caring State? On Rural Welfare Governance in Post-reform Vietnam and China
We make three arguments in this review of the literature on rural welfare governance in Vietnam and China. First, welfare restructuring in these countries has gone through two overlapping processes of contraction and expansion, underlined by changing politics of needs and shifting modes of governance since their shift from state to market socialism. Such politics are the outcome of the Communist party-state’s dual project of legitimation and cont…
Trading in broken things
Through their deeply gendered performative and place-making practices, migrant waste traders take part in regenerating and revaluing urban space in Hanoi, Vietnam. Ethnographic research in the city and in their native rural district suggests that these practices are simultaneously strategic and contingent on the waste traders' gender and class positions. This positioning is defined by their marginalization as rural migrants and the social ambigui…
Vietnam's Socialist Servants
1. Introduction 2. Live In, Live Out, Live In the Middle of Nowhere: Labour Regimes and Market Structure 3. Power at Work: Between Harmony and Hierarchy 4. Unruly Servants, Erotic Bodies and Cultural Delinquents: The Representation of Domestic Service 5. Needs, Consumption, and Domestic Service 6. Between Work and Home: Boundaries, Connections and Gendered Expectations Chapter 7. Narrating Identity: the Power and Limits of Individual Life Choice …
Southeast Asian Trajectories of Labour Mobility
Within and across Southeast Asian national borders, there has been a growing circulation of labour, capital, people, and goods. Meanwhile, urbanisation, agrarian changes, and liberal economic restructuring have been drawing a large section of the rural population into mobile economies and trade networks. This special issue explores the linkage between mobility and the growing precaritisation of labour resulting from neoliberalised development pol…
Rural Life in Late Socialism
Late socialist countries are transforming faster than ever. Across China, Laos and Vietnam, where market economies coexist with socialist political rhetoric and the Communist party state’s rule, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of imaginaries of the future alongside uncertainty and anxiety. These countries are three of very few living examples that combine capitalist economics with party state politics. Consequently, societal trans…
Beyond the state? The moral turn of development in South East Asia
Derks A, Nguyen M. Introduction. Beyond the state? The moral turn of development in South East Asia. South East Asia Research . 2020;28(1):1-12
Translocal Householding
This article examines the shifting household organization of care and livelihoods in a community of Vietnam's Red River Delta that has a history of migrating to work in the urban waste trade, and has been doing so increasingly since the socialist country embraced a market economy in the mid-1980s. In Spring District, household care and livelihood activities have been taking place across the city and the countryside for decades, indicating the deg…
"Peasant traders, migrant workers and "supermarkets
This article analyzes the social and spatial dynamics of the mobile trade in low-cost goods by rural people from a mountainous region of China's Zhejiang province and how these interact with the mobility and social reproductive patterns of the rural-urban migrant workers they cater to. Also formally categorized as peasants, the traders not only supply the goods necessary for the maintenance of the workers but also of their spatially divided house…
Welfare in Crisis
Welfare expansion in the global South is partly in response to the social crises caused by neoliberal restructuring since the 1980s, with the 2008 global financial crisis escalating them, and the covid-19 pandemic further exposing the impact on the most precarious working populations. What are the new dynamics of labor struggles against these structural, industrial, and health crises under the expansion of social protection or the lack thereof? H…
Portfolios of Social Protection, Labour Mobility and the Rise of Life Insurance in Rural Central Vietnam
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018-19, this article analyses the changing composition of social protection on the ground in rural central Vietnam, including the recent spread of private life insurance among peasant families. The author uses the concept of portfolios of social protection to denote the emergence of an eclectic mix of measures to manage risks and to prepare for the future in the context of intensified perceptions of r…
Factory worker welfare and the commodification of labour in market socialist Vietnam
State socialist Vietnam formally embraced market reforms in the mid-1980s, and since then advancing marketization under the undisrupted rule of the Communist party. As marketization deepens, the party state’s legitimacy continues to rest on socialist practices of governance, structures of feeling and visions of a class-free society. This political-economic context gives rise to struggles between market and socialist logics over the social questio…
Reconfiguring labour and welfare in the Global South
This special issue explores the intertwining reconfigurations of labour and welfare in the Global South by bringing together eight empirical studies of different national and transnational contexts and three commentaries. It asks how Global South people and states alike have come to prioritize market logics as guiding principles for welfare systems, moving away from collective risk-pooling towards individual responsibility, and how this reorienta…
In a “Half-dark, Half-light Zone”
This article discusses the everyday practices of a mobile network of migrant waste traders originating from northern Vietnam, locating them in an expanding urban waste economy spanning across major urban centres. Based on ethnographic research, I explore how the expansion of the network is foregrounded by the traders’ dealing with the precarious nature of waste trading, which is rooted in the social ambiguity of waste and migrants working with wa…
Fictitious Kinship
This article argues that migrant domestic workers in Hanoi practise a form of fictitious kinship to carve out personal spaces away from their rural home. Biographical narratives of domestic workers who are unusually devoted to forging emotional ties with their employers indicate that they tend to have problematic private lives. Beyond emotional labour, the performance of fictitious kinship entails significant personal investment on the part of wo…
Translocal Householding
This article examines the shifting household organization of care and livelihoods in a community of Vietnam's Red River Delta that has a history of migrating to work in the urban waste trade, and has been doing so increasingly since the socialist country embraced a market economy in the mid-1980s. In Spring District, household care and livelihood activities have been taking place across the city and the countryside for decades, indicating the deg…
Rural-urban migration in Vietnam and China
The transition from state socialism to market socialism in Vietnam and China has been characterized by unprecedented rural-urban migration. We argue that this migration is integral rather than incidental to the gendered reproduction of state and society. A review of the emerging literature on trans-local householding explores the process whereby the reflexive engagement of the state and the household remakes rural-urban differentiation in ways th…
Migration and Care Institutions in Market Socialist Vietnam
Since socialist Vietnam embraced a market economy in the mid-1980s, high population mobility has engendered shifting forms of insecurity in rural livelihoods and family lives. This article discusses how migrant households in a Red River Delta rural district draw on institutions of care beyond family and kinship to deal with such insecurity. These institutions simultaneously respond to local people’s changing needs and aspirations, and attempt to …
Vietnam's Socialist Servants
1. Introduction 2. Live In, Live Out, Live In the Middle of Nowhere: Labour Regimes and Market Structure 3. Power at Work: Between Harmony and Hierarchy 4. Unruly Servants, Erotic Bodies and Cultural Delinquents: The Representation of Domestic Service 5. Needs, Consumption, and Domestic Service 6. Between Work and Home: Boundaries, Connections and Gendered Expectations Chapter 7. Narrating Identity: the Power and Limits of Individual Life Choice …
Trading in broken things
Through their deeply gendered performative and place-making practices, migrant waste traders take part in regenerating and revaluing urban space in Hanoi, Vietnam. Ethnographic research in the city and in their native rural district suggests that these practices are simultaneously strategic and contingent on the waste traders' gender and class positions. This positioning is defined by their marginalization as rural migrants and the social ambigui…
The Caring State? On Rural Welfare Governance in Post-reform Vietnam and China
We make three arguments in this review of the literature on rural welfare governance in Vietnam and China. First, welfare restructuring in these countries has gone through two overlapping processes of contraction and expansion, underlined by changing politics of needs and shifting modes of governance since their shift from state to market socialism. Such politics are the outcome of the Communist party-state’s dual project of legitimation and cont…
Beyond the Global Care Chain
Revisiting the Global Care Chain literature, we reflect on the ways in which care functions as a moral discourse that simultaneously resonates with local people and helps to promote neoliberalization in contexts that are often left out of the literature. We argue that care, both as concept and practice, inflects the broadest moral contradiction, ambivalence and hybridity of our social and political world today. Critiques of inequalities in global…
In a “Half-dark, Half-light Zone”
This article discusses the everyday practices of a mobile network of migrant waste traders originating from northern Vietnam, locating them in an expanding urban waste economy spanning across major urban centres. Based on ethnographic research, I explore how the expansion of the network is foregrounded by the traders’ dealing with the precarious nature of waste trading, which is rooted in the social ambiguity of waste and migrants working with wa…
Southeast Asian Trajectories of Labour Mobility
Within and across Southeast Asian national borders, there has been a growing circulation of labour, capital, people, and goods. Meanwhile, urbanisation, agrarian changes, and liberal economic restructuring have been drawing a large section of the rural population into mobile economies and trade networks. This special issue explores the linkage between mobility and the growing precaritisation of labour resulting from neoliberalised development pol…
Beyond the state? The moral turn of development in South East Asia
Derks A, Nguyen M. Introduction. Beyond the state? The moral turn of development in South East Asia. South East Asia Research . 2020;28(1):1-12
Playing the edge ball
This article analyzes a particular form of everyday politics through the case of land development in a Chinese village. Commonly referred to as edge ball politics ( cabianqiu ), it implies the act of transgressing certain rules or laws and testing the limits of what is socially and legally possible. We found that the state, the village leadership, private developers, and villagers all vie to influence the outcomes of land development in the villa…
Rural Life in Late Socialism
Late socialist countries are transforming faster than ever. Across China, Laos and Vietnam, where market economies coexist with socialist political rhetoric and the Communist party state’s rule, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of imaginaries of the future alongside uncertainty and anxiety. These countries are three of very few living examples that combine capitalist economics with party state politics. Consequently, societal trans…
Portfolios of Social Protection, Labour Mobility and the Rise of Life Insurance in Rural Central Vietnam
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018-19, this article analyses the changing composition of social protection on the ground in rural central Vietnam, including the recent spread of private life insurance among peasant families. The author uses the concept of portfolios of social protection to denote the emergence of an eclectic mix of measures to manage risks and to prepare for the future in the context of intensified perceptions of r…
The entrepreneurial self of market socialism
Casting the self as the primary unit of profit-making and value creation, the entrepreneurial self evolves from neoliberal ideas of self-enterprise and self-development to find ramifications in varying contexts. This article characterizes the entrepreneurial self of market socialism through the case of life insurance agents in Vietnam, where despite deepening marketization, socialist genealogies remain salient alongside cultural frameworks of car…
Welfare in Crisis
Welfare expansion in the global South is partly in response to the social crises caused by neoliberal restructuring since the 1980s, with the 2008 global financial crisis escalating them, and the covid-19 pandemic further exposing the impact on the most precarious working populations. What are the new dynamics of labor struggles against these structural, industrial, and health crises under the expansion of social protection or the lack thereof? H…
Factory worker welfare and the commodification of labour in market socialist Vietnam
State socialist Vietnam formally embraced market reforms in the mid-1980s, and since then advancing marketization under the undisrupted rule of the Communist party. As marketization deepens, the party state’s legitimacy continues to rest on socialist practices of governance, structures of feeling and visions of a class-free society. This political-economic context gives rise to struggles between market and socialist logics over the social questio…
Reconfiguring labour and welfare in the Global South
This special issue explores the intertwining reconfigurations of labour and welfare in the Global South by bringing together eight empirical studies of different national and transnational contexts and three commentaries. It asks how Global South people and states alike have come to prioritize market logics as guiding principles for welfare systems, moving away from collective risk-pooling towards individual responsibility, and how this reorienta…
"Peasant traders, migrant workers and "supermarkets
This article analyzes the social and spatial dynamics of the mobile trade in low-cost goods by rural people from a mountainous region of China's Zhejiang province and how these interact with the mobility and social reproductive patterns of the rural-urban migrant workers they cater to. Also formally categorized as peasants, the traders not only supply the goods necessary for the maintenance of the workers but also of their spatially divided house…
Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Economics (16 works) · Law (12 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (9 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (9 works) · Market economy (8 works) · Politics (8 works)