Vietnam Modern: Urban Life among the Ruins of Utopias Past

Biographical Note
Prof. Christina Schwenkel (University of California, Riverside, USA)
Christina Schwenkel is associate professor of anthropology and Southeast Asian studies at the University of California, Riverside. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Vietnam on the transnational co-production of historical memory and postwar reconstruction of urban infrastructure. Schwenkel is the author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (2009) and a co-edited a special issue of positions: asia critique (with Ann Marie Leshkowich), “Neoliberalism in Vietnam” (2012).
Her research focuses on transnationalism, historical memory, aesthetics, and visual culture in Vietnam. Her current work examines the legacies of socialist humanitarian practices and transnational mobilities between Vietnam and former East Germany, in particular, Vietnamese contract labor programs in German factories and East German architectural/urban planning projects in Vietnam. In 2010-2011, Professor Schwenkel conducted historical and ethnographic research in Vinh City, Vietnam on postwar socialist urbanization and postsocialist/neoliberal urban renewal. Funded by Fulbright-Hays, ACLS, and the UC Pacific Rim Research Program, Schwenkel traced shifts in the aesthetic, cultural and affective meanings and value of East German-built public housing, from its postwar construction as a model socialist community to its privatization and impending demolition under new forms of urban governance and new market economic initiatives.

Source and further information: UC Riverside, Link (20 June 2019)