This talk approaches the dramatic changes in consumption patterns in Vietnam over the past decades, combining a focus on everyday life and large-scale development processes. The talk takes as a starting point the recently published book Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (Palgrave, 2022). Based on a decade of research in Vietnam, the book aims to contribute to better understanding one of the most fascinating ‘development success stories’ in the world the past decades. In doing so, it unpacks the ‘socialist market economy’ and introduces the term ‘consumer socialism’ to analyse some of the contradictions embedded in this development model. Simultaneously, the book aims to contribute to strengthening consumption research in and on emerging economies, and for this purpose develops a theoretical approach focusing on social practices and the political economy of consumption.
This seminar will take place online via Zoom.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Arve Hansen is a Researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo and leader of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. He has more than a decade of experience working in and on Vietnam and has published widely on consumption, middle classes and development in the country. He is the author of Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (Palgrave, 2022) and the editor of several volumes, including Consumption, Sustainability and Everyday Life (Palgrave, 2023 with Kenneth Bo Nielsen), Changing Meat Cultures: Food Practices, Global Capitalism, and the Consumption of Animals (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021, with Karen Lykke Syse) and The Socialist Market Economy in Asia: Development in China, Vietnam and Laos (2020, Palgrave, with Jo Inge Bekkevold and Kristen Nordhaug).
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).