This is the first annual AAS conference in Canada since 2017 (Toronto), and the first ever in Vancouver. The following information comes from the AAS online program. Several panels are exclusively on Vietnam studies, and they appear in full below, and in blue. Otherwise, first is the panel’s title then information about the presentation (whose number indicates its order of speaking on the panel) and the presenter.

THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2026

Session 101: Storytelling in International Relations
Thursday, March 12, 2026
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 103/104

6: Of Stone and Sky: Vietnamese and Chinese Pictorialism in Hanoi
Marie-Agathe Simonetti (she/her/hers)
University of Illinois Chicago, United States

Võ An Ninh (1907-2009), one of the most celebrated photographers in Vietnam, was a photojournalist, but he also produced pictorialist works, such as Phnom Penh – A Corner of Phnom’s Pagoda, 1936. Despite Võ An Ninh’s popularity, there is little knowledge of how he learned photography and his practice. At the beginning of his career, he worked for the French colonial government as a photographer. In the 1930s and 1940s, he exhibited with painters from the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (EBAI) in their annual salons in Hanoi. Võ An Ninh shared similar aesthetic visions with French and Vietnamese EBAI painters. More research is needed to better understand the interaction between Vietnamese photographers and painters in the 1930s and 1940s in Hanoi. Beyond the French colonial apparatus, the connection between Chinese pictorialism and pictorialism in Vietnam has yet to be established. Chinese pictorialist photographer Tchan Fou Li (1916 -2018) lived eleven years in Vietnam (1944-1955). He participated in the first national artistic photography exhibition in Hanoi in 1952, during the Indochina War, alongside another Chinese compatriot, Tchen Fong Ku. Stylistically, some of Võ An Ninh’s photographs could be linked to the famed Chinese pictorialist Long Chin-San. Vietnamese photographers Bùi Quý Vụ and Trịnh Dình Phượng in the 1952 exhibition catalog also adopted an “ink painting style.” My paper will thus argue that pictorialism in Vietnam might not be associated with the French apparatus but with Chinese pictorialism. While not widely recognized, Vietnamese photographers were part of the international pictorialist movement.

Session 109: At the Interstices of Economic Progress and Environmental Preservation in Southeast Asia
Thursday, March 12, 2026
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 115

3: Diversifying Paths to Green Growth: Renewable Energy Development Models in Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines
YoungKyung Ko (she/her/hers)
Yonsei University, Republic of Korea

Facing dual pressures from tightening global environmental regulations and the urgent need for new economic growth drivers, ASEAN developing countries increasingly turn to green growth policies as both climate adaptation and development pathways. This paper examines how Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines have pursued renewable energy transitions by analyzing whether their diﬀerent policy approaches eﬀectively address both climate resilience and long-term economic development goals. We analyze three distinct models: Vietnam’s Market-led Acceleration Model (aggressive FITs), Indonesia’s Resource-Partnership Model (JETP and geothermal), and The Philippines’ Institution-led Gradualism Model (RPS and green energy auctions). Vietnam achieved impressive growth (0 to 21GW solar, 2018-2023), but this speed-focused strategy created grid instability and policy credibility issues. Indonesia’s approach, despite securing signiﬁcant green commitments, remains constrained by policy contradictions, notably the persistence of massive fossil fuel subsidies that undermine price competitiveness. The Philippines’ comprehensive frameworks face signiﬁcant implementation gaps due to pre-existing grid infrastructure limitations and high electricity costs. The comparative analysis reveals that while all three countries have made measurable progress, the full translation of renewable energy deployment into sustainable economic beneﬁts is incomplete due to mismatches between policy ambition and practical capacity. The study argues that the observed gaps stem from policy instruments operating misaligned with existing national institutional and infrastructure limits. This paper contributes by elaborating on the necessity of careful calibration of transition policies with existing institutional and infrastructure capacities for successful green transitions in climate-vulnerable developing economies.

Session 111: Beyond Borders and States:
Southeast Asian Refugees and Movements in the Late 20th Century
Thursday, March 12, 2026
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 119

1: Silencing Indigenous Homeland(s): Degar Peoples, the Central Highlands, and Ethnic Kinh Nationalism
Ann Ngoc Tran (she/her/hers)
University of California, Los Angeles, United States

This paper examines the Central Highlands as a settler-colonial frontier—a militarily occupied region during the Vietnam War where Indigenous soldiering and displacement were not only consequences of wartime conflict but also the result of long-standing territorial encroachments by both the ethnic Kinh-dominated state of South Vietnam and later, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. As U.S. and ARVN evacuation routes prioritized elite Vietnamese urbanites and military allies in 1975, Montagnard peoples who had fought alongside American forces in hopes of securing their autonomy were left behind, exposed to communist retribution and further marginalization in ethnic hierarchies. The paper argues that the erasure of Indigenous central highlanders in 1975 diaspora histories enables the figure of the Vietnam-era “refugee” to be consolidated around the Kinh Vietnamese subject. This refugee identity, tethered to a homogenizing claim to a native homeland, erases the violent dispossession of Montagnard communities in the Central Highlands and thus negates the existence of Indigenous peoples in diaspora. The entanglement of South Vietnamese refugee identity with a nationalist project that itself participated in the forced relocation and assimilation of Indigenous populations necessitates a critical rethinking of the relationship between “refugee” and “homeland,” concepts that have contributed to the obscuration of Montagnard peoples’ calls for self-determination as well as historically stratified ethnic-Indigenous social relations. Ultimately, the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty in both postwar Vietnam and its global diaspora compels us to reassess the workings of Asian settler colonialism as central to nationalist and diasporic Vietnamese imaginaries, both as citizens and refugees of a nation-state.

4: “Three Color Ice”: 21st-Century Representations of “Twice Minority” Ethnic Chinese from Vietnam in the Diaspora
Alvin Bui
Brooklyn College, United States

This exploratory research examines recent online and media self-representations and misrepresentations of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, or the Hoa. Described as a “twice minority” by Yen Le Espiritu, this group became a “twice diaspora” after the Fall of Saigon. The Hoa’s first near-total exile from their familial homelands in mainland China stemmed from the retreat of the Nationalist Party governing the Republic of China (ROC) to Taiwan and the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Some of these Hoa were exiled a second time as part of the exodus from Vietnam following the end of the Vietnam War. Some ended up in the United States, where they became racialized by others as Asian (Americans) and categorized (themselves) in response to the U.S. Census as Asian (Americans) and Chinese (Americans). I look at media discourse, digital-born sources (Facebook comments, Wikipedia pages, Hoa/Chinese school alumni websites or blogs), documents that have been digitized for distribution on the internet (school yearbooks, films and documentaries) and a now-defunct website named after the popular Vietnamese sweet soup, chè ba màu (and translated into Chinese as 三⾊冰 or “Three Color Ice”, which typically consists of red azuki bean, yellow mung bean and green pandan jelly.) I posit that while the media does not grasp the twice diasporic history of the Hoa, the majority of self-produced internet “memoryscapes” curate a collective memory of a specific Vietnam (that of the Republic of Vietnam) and its Cold War anti-communist allyship with the ROC.

Session 114: Archives and Data in Dialogue:
French Perspectives on Vietnamese Studies from Women and Early-career Scholars (Roundtable)
Thursday, March 12, 2026
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 122

Organizers
Violette Dolin
Institut de Recherches asiatiques, France

Ombeline Bois
Paul Valéry University of Montpellier, France

Chair
Jade Thau
INHA – InVisu, France

Discussants
Vy Cao (he/him/his)
Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History, Luxembourg

Jade Thau
INHA – InVisu, France

Ombeline Bois
Paul Valéry University of Montpellier, France

Cathy Monarque
Paul Valéry University of Montpellier, France

French research on Vietnam relies on a wide array of multilingual, dispersed, and heterogeneous sources, from colonial archives and local records to oral testimonies and digital materials. Drawing on our own research practices, this roundtable aims to explore how these sources are accessed, processed, and ultimately mobilized in the production of knowledge about Vietnam history and society.

Cao Vy, postdoctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), works with digitised content and multilingual collections from the colonial period. Jade Thau, postdoctoral researcher at the INHA – InVisu in Paris, focuses on the arts of the Vietnamese socialist period (1945-1986), using a range of sources including artworks, archives and interviews, mainly in Vietnamese. Ombeline Bois and Cathy Monarque, both PhD candidates at CRISES, Paul Valéry University of Montpellier, respectively study the involvement of the Vietnamese diaspora in France in associations (1954-1996), and cultural dialogue as margins of diplomatic negotiation in the redeﬁnition of France’s relations with Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (1976-1996). Violette Dolin, a PhD candidate at IRASIA, Aix-Marseille University, explores the role of the French army in the education of natives of the French colonial Empire.

Working with such a diversity of materials results in a number of methodological challenges. Since many of these sources were produced by colonial administrations, researchers must critically engage with their orientalist assumptions and systemic biases. How can we avoid Eurocentric framings of Vietnamese histories and voices? Oral sources, in particular, raise sensitive ethical concerns: issues of consent, conﬁdentiality, vulnerability, and memory must be approached with care and critical awareness. The multilingual nature of our sources also shapes our narratives, prompting a critical reﬂection on translation as both an interpretative and epistemological process. Finally, how are research outputs – databases, visualisation tools, publications, and exhibitions – shaped by decisions regarding audience, language, format, and institutional partnerships?

Grounded in our concrete research experiences, this roundtable will also examine how the researcher’s identity, including origin and gender, impacts the research process in Vietnamese studies, from topic selection to dissemination. Consequently, this session aims to stimulate dialogue in a transnational and postcolonial research context.

Session 133: Global China in Global Afro-Asia:
Geo-Politics, Technology, and Culture
Thursday, March 12, 2026
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 219

3: Localizing Technology, Reimagining the Region: Vietnamese Agency in the Chinese-Assisted Thái Nguyên Steelworks, 1958–1978
Xun Wang (she/her/hers)
National University of Singapore, Vietnam

In the 1960s and 1970s, workers and experts of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) constructed and brought into operation the Thái Nguyên Steelworks, Vietnam’s ﬁrst integrated iron and steel plant, with Chinese technical assistance. Thus, the steelworks became a critical site for examining the ﬂow of technology and knowledge across the China–Vietnam border and their adaptation to Vietnam’s local ecological and socio-political conditions. While conventional studies emphasize the Chinese role in shaping such projects, this paper foregrounds the agency of Vietnamese experts and workers, exploring how their familiarity with local conditions facilitated the adaptation of the Thái Nguyên Steelworks. The paper focuses on the period from 1958 to 1978, spanning its initial construction before the escalation of the Vietnam War and its rebuilding after wartime damage. Drawing on Vietnamese and Chinese archival sources, it argues that Vietnamese actors actively negotiated technology transfer, facilitating the localization of industrial knowledge to ﬁt domestic conditions. In doing so, it highlights the dynamic and reciprocal nature of technological interactions in Cold War Southeast Asia. By centering Vietnamese perspectives, this study contributes to broader eﬀorts to rethink Southeast Asian studies from within the region. It challenges conventional donor-recipient narratives and dominant development models drawn from industrialized countries, emphasizing instead the diverse, locally grounded trajectories of industrialization in Cold War Southeast Asia. More broadly, it invites reﬂection on how Southeast Asia’s histories of technology, labor, and knowledge production can reshape the ﬁeld’s foundations, methods, and aspirations.

Session 138: Addressing Long-Term Care Challenges in the Context of Rapid Aging Across Asia
Thursday, March 12, 2026
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 302

1: Family Care as a Social Protection Pattern: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Aging in Vietnam
Thi Viet Phuong Dang (she/her/hers)
Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Vietnam

As Asia is facing with rapidly aging populations, family caregiving plays a pivotal role in elderly care, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where the formal long-term care (LTC) system are still developing. In this context, family caregiving has emerged as an effective and necessary solution to fill the gap in elderly care. This paper explores how adult children in Vietnam perceive and take on caregiving responsibilities for their aging parents, focusing on the Red River Delta and the Mekong Delta, where multigenerational households are common. Drawing from a 2022 sociological survey, the paper examines the social, cultural, and economic factors influencing family caregiving roles and highlights the challenges and benefits of this approach in regions with limited institutional support. Although family care serves as a vital solution in the short term, it also reveals the limitations of relying solely on family-based models, especially in light of changing demographic, economic, and familial structures. The paper argues that, given the widespread practice of multigenerational living in many parts of Asia, integrating family care into formal LTC systems could be a sustainable approach to addressing the growing care needs of the elderly. It proposes the development of policies and mechanisms that recognize and support family caregivers, including financial assistance, training, and social protection. By fostering a more inclusive and sustainable LTC framework, these policies could reduce the burden on public healthcare systems and promote community-based aging solutions in Vietnam and other Asian countries.

2: Designing Vietnam’s Public Pension System: Addressing a Universal Pension Scheme Under the Rapid Aging Population
Viet Tiep Nguyen (he/him/his)
University of Tokyo, Japan

Ensuring social protection for citizens has long been a priority of the Vietnamese government, particularly as the country faces the challenges posed by an aging population. Since its foundation in 1945, the development of social insurance and public assistance systems has evolved through trials and errors. A significant shift occurred in 1995 with the establishment of the Social Insurance Fund, transitioning from a fully tax-financed system to a contributory insurance model. This move extended mandatory coverage to public servants, military personnel, and enterprise employees, and, in 2008, voluntary enrollment was introduced for workers in the informal sector, such as farmers and the self-employed. Despite these advancements, challenges persist. Informal employment remains dominant in the labor market, complicating efforts to ensure stable participation in the insurance-based system. As of recent data, only 32.4% of the working-age population is covered by social insurance, leaving over two-thirds of workers unprotected. Meanwhile, Vietnam faces one of the fastest rates of population aging globally, which poses significant risks to the sustainability of the social security system. The 13th National Congress of the Communist Party (2021) recognized aging as a critical threat and underscored the need for comprehensive old-age protection measures. This paper examines Vietnam’s public pension system as a response to demographic aging and its potential to reduce intergenerational inequities. It explores the challenges of establishing an inclusive pension scheme for all citizens, considering the need for systemic reforms to build a sustainable, equitable social protection system amidst rapid demographic change.

FRIDAY, MARCH 14, 2026

Session Type: Late Breaking Panel
The Life and Work of Gerard Sasges (Roundtable)
Friday, March 13, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM PDT
Location: TBA

Chair
Peter Zinoman (he/him/his)
University of California, Berkeley, United States

Discussants
Jamie Gillen
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Christopher Goscha
Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

Timothy Amos
University of Sydney

Uyen Nguyen (she/her/hers)
Harvard University, United States

Hazel Hahn (she/her/hers)
Seattle University, United States

This roundtable explores the life and work of Gerard Sasges – a brilliant scholar of modern Vietnam and an Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore – who passed away prematurely in summer, 2025. Panelists will address three periods in Gerard’s academic career: his graduate training in the History Department at UC Berkeley, his decade-long tenure running the University of California Education Abroad Program in Hanoi, and his career as a faculty member in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. The roundtable will pay special attention to Gerard’s remarkable body of scholarship including his important monograph Imperial Intoxication: Alcohol and the Making of Colonial Vietnam (University of Hawaii Press, 2017); his ambitious collection of oral histories about the nature of work in Vietnam – It’s a Living: Work and Life in Vietnam Today (NUS Press, 2013) and a series of groundbreaking shorter studies that he published on the economic history of French Indochina

Session 216: Navigating the State of Academic Freedom in Southeast Asia
Friday, March 13, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 112

4: Silenced Voices: Navigating Censorship and Academic Freedom in Vietnam
Thiem Hai Bui (he/him/his)
Malmö University, Sweden

Vietnam’s academic landscape operates under signiﬁcant constraints, where state-driven censorship shapes the boundaries of intellectual discourse. This presentation examines the interplay between censorship and academic freedom, exploring how government policies, cultural norms, and institutional pressures impact scholars, researchers, and students. Despite Vietnam’s rapid modernization and global integration, the Party-State’s tight control over media, publishing, and education stiﬂes open inquiry, particularly on sensitive topics like politics, history, civil society and human rights. The mechanisms of censorship are diverse, ranging from explicit laws to subtle self-censorship practices. By analyzing recent policy shifts and their implications, the presentation underscores the tension between state ideology and the pursuit of knowledge. It argues that fostering academic freedom is critical for Vietnam’s intellectual and economic progress, yet faces resistance from entrenched political priorities. This exploration oﬀers insights into the broader challenges of balancing state control with academic autonomy in authoritarian contexts, drawing parallels with global trends.

Session 226: Bridging Area and International Studies:
Statecraft, Soft Power, and Historical Narratives
Friday, March 13, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 202

2: The Strength of Weak Ties? Southeast Asia-Russia Relations Post-Invasion of Ukraine
Eugene Tan
ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore

Despite the apparent uniﬁed ASEAN-wide position on the invasion at its outset, Southeast Asia’s position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increasingly diverged. What explains Southeast Asia’s variegated responses, and the strength of Russia’s bilateral relationship with diﬀerent ASEAN member states? This presentation probes this question by examining the cases of Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia, each representing the ends and middle of the spectrum respectively. Given Russia’s limited economic, diplomatic, and military engagement in the region, this presentation suggests that ideational and historical factors provide a stronger explanation of Southeast Asian post-invasion relations with Russia. This presentation drawing both on methods associated with mainstream International Relations – textual analysis of media and government reports on the invasion – as well as deep Area Research – post-Cold War archival material, and supplementary interviews with oﬃcials and scholars. As such, the presentation uses a contemporary event to demonstrate how the divide between Area Studies and International Relations are not as far apart as commonly assumed.

Session 316: Vietnamese Engagements with Buddhist Modernism, 1950s to the Present
Friday, March 13, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 112

Organizer
Nu-Anh Tran (she/her/hers)
University of Connecticut, United States

Chair & Discussant
Janet Hoskins
University of Southern California, United States

Paper Presenters
Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox
Western Connecticut University, United States

Nu-Anh Tran (she/her/hers)
University of Connecticut, United States

Sara Swenson
Dartmouth College, United States

This panel examines Buddhist modernism in the southern half of Vietnam from the 1950s to the present. Buddhist modernism emerged across Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries as a response to Western imperialism. Modernists argued that their religion was a rational and ethical doctrine that was compatible with modern science and that Buddhism should engage more deeply with social and political life. Such novel ideas had become mainstream by the 1950s. Much of the scholarship on Buddhist modernism has either neglected the study of Vietnam or relied exclusively on Western-language sources to do so. In contrast, our panel draws on Vietnamese materials to situate Vietnamese Buddhism within the larger phenomenon of religious modernity. Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox argues that the prominent South Vietnamese cleric Thích Tâm Châu was a humanist proponent of Buddhist modernism who favored supplementing science with Buddhist ethical principles. Nu-Anh Tran ﬁnds that religious activists during the Buddhist crisis of 1963 transformed the traditional practice of self-immolation into a modern political tactic. Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê contends that Thích Nhất Hạnh’s writing on “engaged Buddhism” in the 1950s and 1960s reinterpreted core Buddhist concepts and made them resources for social transformation. Lastly, Sara A. Swenson ﬁnds that Buddhist merit-making in Ho Chi Minh City during the covid 19 pandemic drew on both traditional religious concepts and scientiﬁc understandings of microbes to blend modern concerns with miraculous possibilities. Together, these papers advance scholarship on Vietnamese Buddhist modernism by illuminating how believers have mediated moral, political, and scientiﬁc modernities.

1: Reading Thích Tâm Châu’s Humanist Politics
Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox
Western Connecticut University, United States

Thích Tâm Châu, who became a monk at the age of 11 in 1932 in Ninh Bình, emerged as a central ﬁgure in the Buddhist uniﬁcation movement and a proponent of Buddhist modernism prior to moving to the south in 1954. He had a relatively low proﬁle in the south until a meteoric rise to prominence in 1963. During the pivotal years of 1964-1967, amid widespread Buddhist protests against successive South Vietnamese regimes and American intervention, Thích Tâm Châu was in a powerful position as Director of the Buddhist Institute for the Propagation of the Faith (Viện Hóa Đạo). He played a crucial role in moderating the more radical Ấn Quang faction, led by Thích Trí Quang (1923-2019). He sought to temper anti-American sentiments among Buddhist monks who were organizing street protests during the mid-1960s. This essay seeks to understand his rise to power and his temperate views using three sources: his poetry, his prose writings on Buddhist humanism, and most importantly, his comments in the press as the leader of a Spring 1963 organization dedicated to pressuring the Ngô Đình Diệm administration to ban Kenji Misumi’s 1961 ﬁlm Sakya. It argues that Thích Tâm Châu is above all a humanist proponent of Buddhist modernism who rejected what he saw as superstition and believed that Buddhist principles supported the insights of modern physics but thought that science needed to be supplemented with Buddhist ethical principles—principles that were, based on his own experiences, antithetical to communism.

2: Bodily Contests, Bodily Sacrifices: Self-Immolation and the Buddhist Crisis of 1963 in the Republic of Vietnam
Nu-Anh Tran (she/her/hers)
University of Connecticut, United States

The self-immolation of the monk Thích Quảng Đức is the most iconic image of the Buddhist crisis of 1963 in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The crisis was a months-long conﬂict between the government of Ngô Đình Diệm and a Buddhist protest movement. Quảng Đức’s ﬁery death established self-immolation as the movement’s signature method, and it remains the most famous instance of intentional death by ﬁre in world history. Yet there is barely any scholarship on the practice of self-immolation during the crisis of 1963. Most research on self-immolation focuses on China and South Asia rather than Vietnam, and the scholarship on the crisis has neglected to analyze ﬁery self-sacriﬁce as a practice. My paper will be the ﬁrst in-depth exploration of self-immolation during the Buddhist crisis of 1963. I argue that ideas and practices surrounding the physical body profoundly shaped both the Buddhist protests and the Ngô Đình Diệm’s response. The regime regarded the bodies of its opponents as points of vulnerability and used bodily violence to suppress opposition. In contrast, the Buddhists believed that physical bodies could be sacriﬁced to protect the faith. They drew on the traditional religious practice of self-immolation and introduced innovations that transformed it into a modern method of resistance. Quảng Đức’s sacriﬁce inspired other Vietnamese Buddhists to burn themselves to death, and their sacriﬁces gradually normalized self-immolation as a universally understood political tactic.

3: The Cause of Suffering: Buddhist Health and Healing in Ho Chi Minh City
Sara A. Swenson
Dartmouth College, United States

In this presentation, I introduce two case studies of lay and monastic Buddhists in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, who used interventions in karma to navigate the Covid-19 pandemic. These practitioners understood illness as caused by karma. They subsequently sought to make merit to improve not only their own karma, but also the “collective karma” [cộng nghiệp] of society. Among their merit-making practices, many worked to reduce harm toward “sentient beings” [chúng sinh] by adopting vegan diets, engaging in “life-releasing” [phóng sinh] rituals, and avoiding anti-microbial cleaning products. I analyze these interventions as a form of “Buddhist ontoethics.” Ontoethics are actions taken to aﬀect diﬀerent manifestations and experiences of the world. For example, by avoiding anti-microbial cleaning products, Buddhists practiced compassion for bacteria and viruses, striving to improve the karmic relationship between humans and microbes to end the pandemic. Buddhist ontoethics explains how magic and miracles maintain a powerful appeal to diverse demographics of practitioners, from the highly educated and upwardly mobile to petty traders and day laborers. This appeal was so strong during the pandemic, that the government intervened to cancel some merit-making rituals with warnings that an over-reliance on Buddhism was “too superstitious” [quá mê tín] and “unscientiﬁc” [phản khoa học]. These case studies show how urban Buddhists blend modern logics with karmic ontologies in order to eﬀect social change. My paper shows how modern Buddhism has become one facet on a spectrum of religious repertoires that contemporary practitioners use when navigating unprecedented challenges like the pandemic.

Session 319: Digital Horizons of Vietnam Studies:
Collections, Collaborations, Creative Applications (Roundtable)
Friday, March 13, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 115

Organizer & Chair
Cindy Nguyen
University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Discussants
John Phan
Columbia University, United States

Vy Cao (he/him/his)
Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History, Luxembourg

George Dutton (he/him/his)
University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Lan To Nguyen
Institute of Philosophy
Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, United States

Vietnam studies has undergone several transformations in the recent decades–from an interdisciplinary expansion and new generation of scholars working across languages and institutions to public scholarly engagements tied to Vietnam and the diaspora. The recent commemoration of ﬁfty years after the conclusion of the Vietnam War/Second Indochina War/ American War marks the tremendous changes in Vietnam studies as a ﬁeld. In parallel, Vietnam Studies is also undergoing a signiﬁcant transformation in digital scholarship reshaping the ﬁeld through interdisciplinary methodologies and public facing opportunities. This innovative roundtable addresses the expansive landscape and future horizons of digital scholarship in Vietnam Studies through a focus on digital collections, transnational collaborations, and creative applications through pedagogy and experimental digital humanities. This panel will center speciﬁc projects with a range of Vietnamese materials at different stages to showcase the transdisciplinary and collaborative potential for digital scholarship, methodological innovation, and training next generation scholars.

George Duttton will focus on digitizing the Dai Nam Nhat Thong Chi gazetteer and addresses the challenges of OCR, textual annotation, and cross-disciplinary usability. Nguyễn Tô Lan showcases the Vietnam Buddhist Resource Digital Repository, a scholar-led initiative to collect, digitize, and provide open global access—free of charge—to resources on Vietnamese Buddhism, with a particular emphasis on Sino-Nôm texts. Cao Vy presents the “RAG’it” project, a DISTAM-funded experiment, which applies Retrieval-Augmented Generation techniques to analyze the development of neologisms across early 20th-century Vietnamese periodicals of Nam Phong and the Tân Việt. Cindy Nguyen’s “Social Worlds” project draws from her work on a colonial multilingual Vietnamese encyclopedia to demonstrate how combining close reading with computational methods like vector space modeling allows researchers and students to rethink interpretation as a core scholarly act. John Phan will present “Digitizing Vietnam,” led by Columbia University in collaboration with Fulbright University Vietnam, which offers a digital hub for Vietnamese Studies, digitized resources, bibliographic tools, and pedagogical materials. We organize the innovative panel around short presentations around case studies and demonstrations focused on key questions and challenges, prioritizing an engaged discussion for sharing resources, collective brainstorming, and forming collaborations.

Session 320: Internationalist Southeast Asias:
Towards a Conjunctural Framework (Roundtable)
Friday, March 13, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 118

Speakers include:
Long T. Bui
University of California, Irvine, United States

Southeast Asia has long been the frontier region for various accumulative-expropriative regimes that conjoined capitalist exploitation with imperialist domination, thereby necessitating oppositional movements that may occasionally adopt an internationalist form in resistance to these interlocking oppressions. Noteworthy examples include the global anarchist movement linking the Philippines and Cuba in the early 20th century, the contributions of Ho Chi Minh and Tan Malaka to the Comintern during the interwar period, the electrifying Bandung moment during the long Sixties, and, as we approach the contemporary era, the solidarity actions of gig workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the cross-racial abolitionist efforts throughout North America opposing the deportation of refugees and undocumented immigrants. Drawing inspiration from C.L.R. James’s A History of Pan-African Revolt, which illustrates a long interconnected history of Pan-African struggles, this panel identifies two pressing conceptual, historiographical, and methodological inquiries within Southeast Asian studies. Firstly, how can we examine these radical anti-systemic struggles across global Southeast Asias within a unified framework? Secondly, how can we situate these struggles within a broader conjuncture that reveals the oppressive structures of colonialism and capitalism against which they contend? In addressing these questions, this panel proposes the “Global Conjunctural Frame” as a generative framework for relationally historicizing and connecting each instance of internationalist praxis. Building upon the work of postcolonial geographer Gillian Hart, this conjunctural framework facilitates the examination of contradictions and crises within the global history of capitalist development as it is situated and centered in Southeast Asia. The lightning talk (Pecha Kucha) format of this panel aspires to gather concise 5-minute provocations from six interdisciplinary scholars to discuss history, politics, and methodology for studying left internationalism in global Southeast Asias—or, more accurately, internationalist Southeast Asias.

321: Women’s Movements: History, Politics, Activism, and Feminism in Asia
Friday, March 13, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 119

1: Vietnamese Women’s Movements: History, Politics, Activism, and Feminism
Thuy Thi Thanh Do (she/her/hers)
Hoa Sen University, Vietnam

This essay reviews the social, political, and economic history of Vietnam from the French colonial period to the present, examining how it has shaped the Vietnamese women’s movements. The history of women’s movements in Vietnam, therefore, is characterized by and periodized according to the country’s historical context, including three periods: before the French War (before 1945), during the French and American War in Vietnam (between 1945 and 1975), and after the American-Vietnam War (after 1975 to the present). The characteristics of women’s movements in Vietnam are also inﬂuenced by the Vietnamese historical context, which shaped Vietnamese feminism accordingly. Each historical period contributed to particular and signiﬁcant conditions that presented women’s issues and interests during that period, ultimately leading to the emergence of women’s movements. In diﬀerent historical periods, women’s interests varied and depended on the political contexts at that moment. In other words, feminism in Vietnam is inﬂuenced by, and in turn inﬂuences, social, political, and historical contexts. I argue that the history of women’s movements in Vietnam is not only the history of women’s movement to ﬁght women’s issues or focus on women’s interests, but also the history of the political contexts and power that shape the focus of the women’s movements and imply the Vietnamese state feminism and feminism.

2: Marriage Diplomacy and Royal Women’s Movements: A Comparative Study of Women’s Roles in Pre-Modern Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Court Politics
Hanh Thi My Nguyen (she/her/hers)
Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam

This article examines marriage diplomacy as a crucial political instrument in pre-modern Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the role of royal women in shaping inter-polity relations. By comparing notable Vietnamese cases – such as Princess Huyền Trân (14th century) and Lê Ngọc Hân (18th century) – with parallel examples from Cambodia, Thailand, and Ayutthaya, the study analyzes how royal marriages were employed to consolidate dynastic authority, resolve territorial disputes, and forge regional alliances. Drawing on chronicles, envoy records, and recent scholarship, it argues that royal women were not merely passive subjects of political agreements but active agents in cultural transmission, power legitimization, and the construction of historical memory. The comparison between Vietnam and other Southeast Asian polities reveals shared patterns of marriage diplomacy as a form of soft power, while also highlighting differences rooted in court structures, geopolitical configurations, and gender norms. By linking diplomatic history with gender studies, this article repositions royal women from the confines of the “inner court” to active participants in pre-modern international relations. In doing so, it offers an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the dynamics of royal power and regional connectivity in Southeast Asian history.

Session 342: Diasporic Connections
Friday, March 13, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 219

6: The Undying Ghost: Anti-Communism as Vietnamese Refugees’ Nationalism
Thu Nguyen (she/her/hers)
McGill University, Canada

April 30th 1975 marked the fall of the Republic of Vietnam regime, or the U.S.-allied/backed Saigon regime. Almost instantly afterwards, about 130,000 Vietnamese, most of whom were sympathetic to the fallen regime, fled the country as the winner of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), took over. From then to the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands more left with countless deaths on the journey. Many of those fortunate enough to be resettled ended up in Western liberal democracies, such as the US, France, Germany, Australia, etc. The paper integrates evidence from multiple countries to allow for a wider focus than the U.S., while keeping it as an important location of analysis due to its deep engagement in the Vietnam War. Theoretically, this project will contribute to two main literatures, one regarding refugees as political agents and the other regarding a specific focus on refugees’ nationalism rather than a general framework of diasporic nationalism. I argue that refugeetude harbors Vietnamese refugees’ long-distance nationalism even after resettlement. Specifically, I advance that anti-communism is the underlying ideology for Vietnamese refugees’ nationalism, similar to the opinion of various scholars. Yet, they seem to assume or at least leave unchallenged that Vietnamese refugees’ nationalism is a direct legacy of the Saigon regime. While the latter might have had a great effect on the content and intensity of the former, I seek to emphasize the divergences between the refugees’ nationalist anti-communism with that of the Saigon regime.

Poster Session #2
Friday, March 13, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Ballroom Foyer, Level 1

“Nation-State” in Pre-colonial Mainland Southeast Asia: Beings and Becomings
Trung Q.T Nguyen, PhD
Centre for Asia-Paciﬁc Initiatives, Canada

The nation-state operates as an epistemological diﬀerentiation framework that Western colonial powers imposed upon non-Western polities, obscuring alternative possibilities of political organization. As Vasuki observed, colonialism’s fundamental crime lies in its robbery of alternative futures. Yet what might those alternatives have looked like? International law scholarship, regardless of whether it is traditional or critical, remains dominated by colonial historiography. While rightly emphasizing colonial violence, it inadvertently diminishes pre-colonial political agency by treating these societies primarily as victims rather than active architects of their own political forms. This article problematizes such shared assumptions by examining how Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam constructed their pre-colonial ontological foundations through distinct processes of political diﬀerentiation. Drawing on royal chronicles, popular literature, and historical accounts, I argue that these polities actively theorized and practiced political diﬀerentiation through four key processes: (1) power contestation and acknowledgment – establishing legitimate authority through managed conﬂict; (2) spatial consolidation – creating territorial coherence through cultural and administrative integration; (3) religion as a facilitator of state integration; and (4) pre-colonial racial conceptualization. This historical recovery highlights the potential for pre-colonial political agency to reorient debates on nation-state formation beyond the traditional-critical binary, revealing sophisticated practices that can expand our understanding of governance, territory, and identity in response to contemporary political challenges.

Session 404: Reshaping Sea and Hinterland:
New Perspectives of Imperial China from the Southern Expanse
Friday, March 13, 2026
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM PDT
Location: Pan Paciﬁc Hotel, Oceanview Suite 4

1: Cantonese Collaboration and Native Official Trade in the Early Modern Upper Tongking Gulf Region
Joey Low (he/him/his)
Brandeis University, United States

Previous scholarship on early modern Guangxi usually focuses on the expansion of Han Chinese and the state, particularly the spread of Cantonese entrepreneurial merchants and local elites. There is a tendency to downplay the agency and transregionalism of the indigenous elites known as the native oﬃcials (tuguan). In an alternative remodelling of our understanding on southwestern Guangxi and its connection to South China, this paper focuses on the economic and political activities of the native oﬃcials in collaboration with southern Chinese actors. Rather than succumb to imperial bureaucratization (gaitu guiliu), the native oﬃcials employed the help of the Cantonese and often exploited minimalist imperial policies to increase their own power. In some cases, native oﬃcials were deeply involved in both the sea and Dai Viet politics. In one example, I show that the native oﬃcials in the China-Vietnam borderlands accelerated gun production in Dai Viet by hiring Cantonese traders to purchase gunpowder ingredients from Guangdong to smuggle into it. In another example, shipwrecked Cantonese oﬀ the coasts of An Bang province were converted to military farm laborers in the hinterlands before escaping into Longzhou and facing repatriation through an illicit deal between the Le court and a local headman in the late ﬁfteenth century. By viewing the native oﬃcials from a maritime and transregional lens, I argue that the relationship between the native oﬃcials and the imperial state was rooted in partnership, raising questions on how state power maintained itself in southern China and the borderlands, both inland and coastal.

Session 413: Religion and Southeast Asia—
Practices, Politics, and Transformations in Everyday Life
Friday, March 13, 2026
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 110

4: Sanctuaries of Sovereignty: Theravā da Buddhism and Political Belonging Among the Khmer Krom in Vietnam
Sopanha Bunthoeun (he/him/his)
Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

This paper explores how Theravāda Buddhist monasteries serve as both spiritual sanctuaries and political spaces for the Khmer Krom—an Indigenous Khmer community in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. While the Vietnamese state oﬃcially recognizes the Khmer as an ethnic minority, the Khmer Krom face persistent marginalization through linguistic assimilation, limited religious autonomy, and the erasure of Indigenous identity. In this context, monasteries function not only as religious institutions but also as sites of cultural resilience, informal governance, and mediated political expression. Drawing on ethnographic ﬁeldwork in Ho Chi Minh City and provinces in the Mekong Delta, this study investigates how Khmer Krom monks and laypersons engage in subtle forms of resistance and identity-making through monastic education, ritual practice, and the spatial use of Khmer language. As Khmer is largely excluded from state-run schools, monasteries provide alternative pathways for language transmission and ethnic cohesion. At the same time, these sacred spaces mediate complex political relations—both with the Vietnamese state and with Cambodia—by oﬀering a socially sanctioned platform for expressing Khmer identity within state-imposed religious boundaries. Engaging with linguistic landscape theory and the concept of language ideology, the paper argues that Khmer Theravāda Buddhist practices in Vietnam operate within a framework of negotiated sovereignty. Monasteries emerge as arenas of cultural citizenship where political belonging is shaped through ritual, memory, and everyday speech. In highlighting the monastery’s role as both a spiritual and sociopolitical institution, the paper reveals how religious practice becomes a mode of political engagement for a stateless Indigenous community navigating competing forms of authority.

Session 425: Postbellum Disability and Veteran Settlement in China and Vietnam:
Postcolonial Violence, Institutional Change, and Frontier Landscapiﬁcation of the Body
Friday, March 13, 2026
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 202

2: Representing Disability and Maritime Threats in the War Remnants Museum in Vietnam
Ai Binh T. Ho (She/They)
Independent Scholar, Canada

In December 2015, the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, hosted a contemporary exhibition “Vietnam’s Sea and Islands: Beautiful and Peaceful.” This exhibition is a part of the wave of reactive exhibitions following the 2014 China-Vietnam oil rig crisis when a Chinese oil rig started drilling in disputed waters. Like the other events throughout Vietnam, the exhibition focuses on Vietnam’s long history of sea and island sovereignty, particularly its claim to Truong Sa (Spratly) Islands. Photographs of able-bodied men in this collection stand out because they make up more than half of the exhibition’s content. The images of male government officials, fighters in past wars, and present-day soldiers seem to articulate their own objectness as the historical maps and metal boats and guns showcased in the exhibition. Able-bodied masculinity embodies Vietnam’s sovereignty and its readiness to defend against foreigners. This paper focuses on the stark contrast between the able-bodied masculinity in this exhibition and the ubiquitous representations of disability through the rest of the War Remnants Museum. I read the contrast not as a disruption of the Museum’s narrative, but a continuation of the crafted meanings of disability, namely, evidence of imperialist aggression, Vietnam’s victimhood, and heroic sacrifice. The Museum marks disability as unquestionably negative and to be feared as it conflates disability as evidence of foreign violence in real possibility of a new war and mass debilitation.

Session 430: Traces of Science, Medicine, and the Environment:
Ethnographic Explorations in Southeast Asia
Friday, March 13, 2026
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 207

1: Carbon as a Metric of the Nation in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta
Darius Sadighi (he/him/his)
Princeton University, United States

Characterized by the place of smallholder rice, fruit, and aquaculture farmers, Vietnam’s Mekong Delta has recently taken on a central role in the nation’s “carbon imaginary.” As a mediator between life and non-life in the context of socialist biopolitics and climate change adaptation, emissions have emerged as a technocratic framework for regulating labor productivity, socialist morality, and human-nonhuman relations in the delta. Relying on the concept of the trace, I understand the regulation of emissions in Mekong Delta agriculture as a technopolitical metric of socialist progress, against which farmers are increasingly expected to simultaneously measure their contributions to economic output and emissions reduction. By drawing on earlier discourses of socialist morality and participation in national politics, efforts to reduce emissions in agriculture frame the relationship between the individual farmer and the nation’s international reputation as “modern” as opposed to “backward” on the global stage, most prominently at international climate change conferences. On such stages, audience members frequently experience the traces of emissions reductions as a technoscientific logic conflated with modernity that builds on older campaigns of agricultural production by rendering 21st century agricultural technical and technological. As such, “carbon as a metric of the human” in the Mekong Delta relies on the trace to invent new scalar relations between the human, the nation, the international, and the planetary.

3: Science & Spirits in the Search for Vietnamese Martyrs
Tiên Dung Hà (she/her/hers)
Stanford University, United States

Five decades after the Vietnam-American war ended, millions of Vietnamese families are still searching for the remains of their loved ones. My primary concern is the family searches for the remains of Vietnamese martyrs, a category exclusive only for those who died fighting for the North Vietnamese Army. Previous research has studied how Vietnamese families employed spiritual psychics or mediumships to communicate with the spirits of the war dead. And yet, the official Vietnamese state discourse always insisted that psychic mediums to be “nonsensical” or “fraudulent cheaters.” In 2011 the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, which manages all affairs and policies related to veterans and martyrs, issued a directive requiring families to undergo DNA testing to confirm kinship relations before they could claim the remains and/or graves of unidentified martyrs. In this paper I present several case studies of families who employed a combination of different methods, including spiritual mediumship, archival research, testimonies and/or DNA testing, to locate and recover the remains of their loved ones. In doing so, I unpack a central question of: How do Vietnamese families make sense of kinship and belonging through the lens of DNA and the realm of spiritual forces? Instead of reducing the methods families employ to either superstition or science, I analyze how these seemingly conflicting “realms of truth”—scientific identification and spiritual forces—coexist in the ways Vietnamese people reconcile the tensions between DNA identification of the remains and the spiritual forces of their war dead.

Session 514: Power and the Narrative in Vietnamese Tales and Stories
Friday, March 13, 2026
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 110

Organizer & chair
Claudine Ang
National University of Singapore, United States

Discussant
Eric Henry
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States

Paper Presenters
Claudine Ang
National University of Singapore, United States

Kathlene Baldanza
Pennsylvania State University, United States

Lu Zhao
New York University Shanghai, China

Jacqueline Yu
Columbia University, United States

This panel examines how power—of kings, women, envoys, and warlords—operates in storytelling and narrative creation. In one case, the king’s power and its limits are mythologized in a well-loved tale of voluntary submission; in another, a formulaic genre extolling chaste women is creatively expanded to serve practical and therapeutic ends; in a third, an envoy, placed in a position of subordination, ﬂips the script to create an unlikely account of glorious recognition; and ﬁnally, a story of a warlord’s subversion is softened with the language of civility. The power and subordination at work in these four narratives are embedded in Confucian hierarchies of order, and each retelling of the stories seeks to rewrite them to explain away or to invert these disadvantaged positions of submission. At the same time, for these narratives to function in the cultural world in which they are embedded, it is necessary for them to obey the logic of the Confucian ordering of the world. This panel explores how the narratives comply with the accepted order so as to assert unconventional points of view, and, by participating according to the common dictates of this cultural world, thereby distort it and expand the boundaries that circumscribe it.

1: Power and Magical Objects in Vietnam: From the Turtle’s Claw to Le Loi’s Sword
Claudine Ang
National University of Singapore, United States

The lake that lies at the heart of Hanoi goes by the name Hoan Kiem, which means “returning the sword.” This name has its roots in a tale that tells the story of how Le Loi (1384–1433), the founding emperor of the Le dynasty (1428–1789), triumphed over the Chinese Ming army in Dai Viet after a period of Chinese colonization from 1407–1427. Legend has it that, while Le Loi was building up his rebel army, he came into possession of a divine sword. With this sword, Le Loi was able to win every battle and, in 1428, having successfully routed the Ming from Dai Viet, Le Loi ascended the throne. A year after his inauguration, Le Loi was boating on a lake when a giant turtle emerged and identiﬁed himself as an emissary of the Dragon lord; he requested that Le Loi return the sword to the Dragon King. Le Loi relinquished the sword that had brought him victory over the Ming, and the turtle returned to the depths of the lake. Unsurprisingly, the sword has been likened to King Arthur’s Excalibur, another mythical sword that helped a country regain its sovereignty. I would like, however, to link it not to other mythical swords, but to magical objects in Vietnam’s mythology. In particular, I examine how the workings of other magical objects help us to understand a central question in the formulation of this legend: why did the sword have to be returned?

2: Female Power and Prestige in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam: Stories from “Biographies of Exemplary Women”
Kathlene Baldanza
Pennsylvania State University, United States

The genre of “biographies of exemplary women” (liệt nữ truyện 列⼥傳), common across East Asia, ostensibly promotes orthodox Confucian morality. Drawing on nineteenth-century biographies of exemplary women from the Nguyễn dynasty of Vietnam, I show that this versatile genre could be stretched to accommodate a variety of agendas and even female behavior that fell outside of social norms. While their stories largely reinforce patriarchal social structures, it is noteworthy that the women who are the subjects of these biographies also exercise agency. They are often rewarded for refusing remarriage in the face of pressure from neighbors, invoking the virtue of loyalty as a method to avoid forced marriage. In other cases, recognition of exemplary women is a way for the state to grant money and prestige to powerful families. Women who contributed militarily to the Nguyễn are duly recorded here. Perhaps most poignantly, these stories serve as a way to commemorate the trauma of war by naming and recounting the stories of women who faced sexual violence and displacement before the establishment of the dynasty. In addition to the familiar trope of the chaste widow, the stories show us tiger slayers, eﬃcacious spirits, and female generals and spies. Ultimately, the genre oﬀers a relatively untapped source for recovering the lives of women and their ways of exerting power in society.

3: Flipping the Center of Power: A Lê Dynasty Envoy’s Bizarre Adventure in Qing China
Lu Zhao
New York University Shanghai, China

The genre of “envoy travelogues” in traditional East Asia describes a routine of power: the envoy of an East Asian country records his journey to meet the Chinese emperor, symbolizing a Sino-centric order. In the Diary of an Envoy Journey (Sứ Trình Nhật Lục 使程⽇錄, 18th century), this routine of power was ﬂipped. Based on a 1715 trip to Beijing, the travelogue is written in the voice of Nguyễn Công Cơ 阮公基 (1676-1733), the Vietnamese ambassador representing the Lê dynasty. Subverting expectation, it in fact describes how Nguyễn was the center of attention—not the emperor. According to the travelogue, Nguyễn found out he was enshrined alive by two high oﬃcials of the Qing dynasty, who used to be his students. The two oﬃcials not only build a mansion just for Nguyễn’s trip, but even accompany him to see the emperor. Shifting between ruler-subordinate and teacher-student relations, Nguyễn becomes the center of culture (wen ⽂) and the hero of the story. This paper asks how the story telling of the travelogue manages to make such a shift of power and to what audiences this travelogue speaks. Using the Diary of an Envoy Journey as a case study, I argue that envoy travelogues do not necessarily record facts, but engage a speciﬁc audience with narratives that are compelling to them.

4: Altered Appearances: The Barbarity of Zhao Tuo in Shiji
Jacqueline Yu
Columbia University, United States

As the Qin dynasty collapsed around him, the general Zhao Tuo (230–137 BC) captured the southern reaches of the empire, proclaimed it “Nan Yue”, and made himself its king. The Shiji records that Zhao Tuo once gave Lu Jia, an envoy from the court of Emperor Gao (256–195 BC), an audience with “his hair ﬁxed like a pestle” and “his legs stretched out, looking like a scoop.” Aﬀronted, the envoy castigated Zhao Tuo, accusing him of insubordination and threatening military retaliation in return. As with other instances of eﬃcacious diplomatic rhetoric, Lu Jia’s speech causes Zhao Tuo to back down, explaining that he had lived among the man and yi barbarians for such a long time that he no longer knew the proper way to behave. The Shiji leaves questions regarding the function of discourses in civility in this account of political confrontation. Had Zhao Tuo assimilated to the customs of the peripheral peoples whom he governed? The mallet-shaped topknot and dustpan-shaped seat were markers of rudeness and deﬁance, and they were ones that were sometimes — though not always — associated with ethnic alterity. In that case, how could Zhao Tuo’s actions be both indicative of culture and of challenge to Han authority? In this paper, I understand culture and civility as a proxy through which contestations in power occur in reading moments of the politicization of cultural behavior and the racialization of political action.

Session 527: The Question of Value(s) in Vietnamese Social Life
Friday, March 13, 2026
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 203

Organizer & chair & discussant
TRI MAC PHUONG (he/him/his)
University of Victoria, Canada

Paper Presenter(s)
THU HA PHAM
University of Chicago, United States

SON CA LAM
University of Massachusetts, Boston, United States

ANTHONY MORREALE
University of California, Berkeley, United States

KEVIN LI
The Dalton School, United States

Value is life under an interpretation (Kockelman 2010). Building from this premise, what are the various meanings of value (giá trị) and values (giá trị quan) in Vietnamese social life as realized by a range of different characters, from businessmen and gangsters to political refugees and waste recyclers? Braiding methods of anthropology and history, this panel poses a set of questions and provocations to evaluate the transformation of value(s) in the face of economic uncertainties and social upheavals. Thu Ha Pham examines the conversion of waste into wealth by everyday trash pickers centered on the materiality of plastic in a rapidly gentrifying Vietnam. Son Ca Lam focuses on the signiﬁcance of “time” — or the lack thereof — as a social and moral currency that binds the lives of refugee families forcibly displaced after the American War. Kevin Li challenges us to reconsider the underground economy of revolutionary Vietnam where gangsters and elites collide and collude in the formation of the postcolonial nation-state. Anthony Morreale presents a case study of a businessman whose exploits lend a different view to the historiography of anticolonial Vietnamese nationalism. Together, the papers on this panel explore the question of value(s) in Vietnamese society and its diaspora as a seminal process of worldmaking and an existential interpretation of life.

1: The Social Life of Plastic in Vietnam
THU HA PHAM
University of Chicago, United States

On a typical morning, an old woman pushes a pushcart ﬁlled with plastic products to a local depot to recycle. Over three decades, she buys a plot of land, build a house, and puts two children through school on the back of her labor and the value (cash) generated from reselling discarded plastic in Vietnam. The multiple uses of plastic in present day Vietnam accentuate issues of social inequality, growing class cleavages, and aspirational desires among an increasingly stratiﬁed population. Plastic cuts across many forms of everyday economic transactions: from waste recycling to cosmetic enhancements and environmental activism. By surveying local mobilizations against pollution and climate change, the everyday practices of scrap sellers, and the intentional alterations of social bodies in the process, this paper locates plastic as an ethnographic ﬂashpoint, connecting issues of quality and value to global popular culture, local public health, toxic materiality, and climate change in a rapidly gentrifying Saigon.

2: No One Has “Time” in the United States
SON CA LAM
University of Massachusetts, Boston, United States

This paper examines Vietnamese refugee displacement and placemaking through the lens of time. It focuses on family separations that have impacted most refugee families as a result warfare, which also marked a temporal rupture in the continuity of the Vietnamese nation-state and of the family unit—a fracture that birthed the Vietnamese refugee diaspora. Beginning with the 1954 partition of Việt Nam, many refugee families experienced multiple displacements at the beginning of the War against America, before ﬂeeing as refugees and resettling in a new host country. The paper argues how displacement is spatially and temporally rejiggered in domestic spaces of refugee families in the United States, further exacerbating the social distance between generations under the same roof amidst the passing of time.

3: Gilbert Chieu’s Enlightened Renewal Movement 1907-1909
ANTHONY MORREALE
University of California, Berkeley, United States

This essay analyzes the businesses that formed the organizational backbone of Gilbert Chiếu’s Enlightened Renewal (Minh Tan) movement in early 20th-century Cochinchina. Often treated as simple front organizations for clandestine student travel to Japan, the business movement has been dismissed by historians too focused on Phan Bội Châu and Phan Châu Trinh. Shifting focus from exilic revolutionaries to local elite networks reveals a startlingly different picture. Beginning with Chiếu’s call for a “Reform INC” in July 1907, the movement rapidly developed a sophisticated network of Vietnamese businesses. This paper will examine three discrete types of organizations. First, industrial-vocational centers directly competed for market share and human capital development. Second, social centers addressed fundamental Vietnamese market disadvantages, ranging from information asymmetries, lack of neutral meeting spaces, and limited access to legal and capital networks. Third, autonomous grassroots initiatives highlight the importance of rural foundation among canton chiefs and deputy chiefs of the Orchard Heartlands (Miệt Vườn) region. In short, I challenge traditional historiographical interpretations that emphasize urban intellectual alienation of the time. Rather than a hopeless anti-colonial adventure, the Minh Tan movement expressed the anti-immigrant economic aspirations of Orchard Heartland elites seeking to transform administrative power into economic inﬂuence through capital concentration and skills development, which foreshadowed the policies of the Constitutionalist Party a decade later.

4: Beyond Lettered Domains: Rethinking Approaches to Vietnamese Political History
KEVIN LI
The Dalton School, United States

How did Saigon’s gangsters come to dominate mid-20th century Vietnamese political life? Scholars have long struggled to account for this phenomenon, largely casting it as a sideshow to the serious business of revolution, nation-building, and ideological civil war. While recent scholarship has self-consciously departed from nationalist teleology and begun to incorporate actors once deemed irrelevant or illegitimate, prevailing approaches to modern Vietnam continue to render large swaths of political life illegible if not invisible. This paper argues that to make sense of the gangsters’ unheralded rise and decade-long preeminence after World War II requires more than inserting new characters into an existing story. It requires widening the aperture of the historical lens and rethinking foundational assumptions about what constitutes the political—and who gets to be recognized as a political actor. To do so, we must look beyond the lettered domains of colonial life and excavate the overlooked but important relationship between the political underground and the criminal underworld decades earlier.

Session 534: On Women, Sexuality, and Gender Diversity
Friday, March 13, 2026
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 210

4: Defining “Sống Thật” on Vietnamese Media Platforms: A Deeper Cut into Vietnamese Queer Lives
Tan Gia Bao Huynh (he/him/his)
Waseda University, Japan

This paper explores sống thật, a Vietnamese expression meaning “living truthfully”, as a central concept in queer self-representation and mediated visibility in contemporary Vietnam. While often compared to Western ideals of “coming out,” sống thật diverges in its emphasis on relational ethics, contextual negotiation, and the ongoing performance of selfhood within familial, social, and political constraints. Rather than a linear narrative of revelation, sống thật reﬂects a dynamic mode of queer becoming shaped by both local cultural expectations and global media ﬂows. Focusing on three key case studies: traditional lô tô performance troupes, the televised talk show Come Out, and user-generated content on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, this paper examines how queer individuals in Vietnam navigate the competing demands of queer truths, visibility, and safety. Drawing on prominent frameworks on queer and media studies, the paper situates sống thật at the intersection of aﬀect, performance, and media representation. This study argues that digital and televised media both enable and constrain queer visibility, producing staged yet aﬀectively resonant versions of truth. From the strategic performativity of lô tô artists to the confessional scripts of talk shows and the algorithmic pressures of social media, sống thật emerges as a situated ethic, neither purely liberatory nor wholly assimilative. In examining these mediated performances, the paper contributes to broader discussions in queer and media studies about how authenticity is constructed, contested, and lived in non-Western contexts.
Ultimately, sống thật oﬀers a culturally speciﬁc lens to rethink queer visibility beyond dominant global paradigms.

3: Voices Missing from 20th-Century Wars in Vietnam: Women in Vietnam
Patricia D. Norland (she/her/hers)
United States

Over ﬁfty years since the end of the war in Vietnam — and despite a torrent of event last year marking a milestone that merits continued reﬂection — missing are the perspectives of women in Vietnam. Especially, voices of women who devoted their lives to expelling the French, and then the Americans. I propose a paper based on an oral history I compiled, across decades, of nine women in Saigon who participated in the ﬁght for independence: “The Saigon Sisters: Privileged Women in the Resistance” (NIU/Cornell). Why did privileged women rebel? My paper explores ﬁve main motivations described by the Saigon sisters in their own words. Testimony to insights oﬀered by the women is at https://www.thesaigonsisters.com/praise. Despite growing up in the elite in 1940s French Cochinchina, the Saigon sisters forsook comfort and safety to strive for their people’s independence. Several traded French lycée jupes for black pajamas and life in the jungle with the resistance against the French. Others studied abroad, including Oanh who attended college in Wisconsin, and returned to help defeat the French, and later the Americans. Among the reasons the women resisted was seeing their people treated as coolie labor under the French, being starved by the Japanese during WWII, and the corroding of values in the face of Americans dollars and dominance. The women share surprising and revealing details about life in the resistance. Thank you for your kind attention to lifting rarely-heard voices.

Session 535: Catholic Connectivities:
Building Bridges between Asian Catholicism and the Modern World
Friday, March 13, 2026
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 211

4: Expert Transnationals: French Canadian Jesuits Networks Facing the End of the Vietnam War
Phi-Van Nguyen (she/her/hers)
Université de Saint-Boniface, Canada

Following their engagement in the Southeast Asian refugee crisis, the Jesuits created the Jesuit Refugee Service. However, the Jesuits had been previously involved in the region, including in Vietnam, in intellectual and educational projects. How and why did many Jesuits specialize in refugee protection? The Jesuits have had a long history of deep engagement with and then exile again from Asia. This not only happened in the past when their policy of accommodation led to the papal decision to end their mission in 1778, but they faced expulsion again from China in 1951 and from Vietnam in 1976 only to come back later on. This repeated experience of exile and return has undoubtedly contributed to their interest in refugee care and advocacy. However, the nature of their networks also pointed towards this new specialization. Being both part of the Church, members of a religious society, nationals of Western countries for many of them, and immigrants in their country of mission, the Jesuits knew how to read and mobilize these diverse vertical relations. Hence they helped overseas Vietnamese interpret how geopolitical and diplomatic transformations applied to them when they became stateless after 1975 and were caught in juxtaposed sovereignties. The Jesuits also knew how to leverage these same connections horizontally allowing them to coordinate various diplomatic, immigration, or political frameworks to the advantage of refugees who needed to navigate across diﬀerent jurisdiction to obtain asylum or family reunion. The Jesuits specialized in refugee care and advocacy because they realized they could best help them as they were expert transnationals.

Poster Session #4
Friday, March 13, 2026
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Ballroom Foyer, Level 1

Preschool Teachers’ Awareness and Practice of Traditional Vietnamese Cultural Education for Preschool Children in the Context of International Integration
Luyen Thi Nguyen
Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam

Traditional cultural education for the young generation, starting from preschool age, is an important task of every country, especially in the current context of globalization. Vietnam is a country with 54 ethnic groups with cultural diversity. However, research in this ﬁeld is still limited. This study focuses on understanding preschool teachers’ perceptions of traditional Vietnamese cultural education for preschool children and how they use it in their daily work practices at preschools. The qualitative research method, including in-depth interviews with 10 preschool teachers and case studies at two preschools (one in the city, one in the mountain area), are the two main research methods. The research results show that Vietnamese preschool teachers pay great attention to traditional cultural education for children, and they use a variety of ways to organize activities that integrate this content. However, they have diﬃculty in choosing content, which is related to their deep understanding of traditional cultural issues. From the results of the analysis of the current situation, the study proposes a number of measures to educate traditional ethnic culture for preschool children based on two pillars: one is to raise teachers’ awareness of ethnic culture, and the other is to collect and supplement teaching materials on traditional culture suitable for preschool children for teachers.

Vietnam Studies Group
Friday, March 13, 2026
7:30 PM – 9:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 212

This is the annual meeting of the Vietnam Studies Group.

SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2026

Session 621: Knowledge at the Margins:
Reading Communities and the Social Life of Texts in 19th-Century Vietnam
Saturday, March 14, 2026
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 119

Organizer
Jieying Lin
Southwest Jiaotong University, China (People’s Republic)

Chair & Discussant
Zongmei Zhang
Southwest Jiaotong University, China (People’s Republic)

Paper Presenters & Co-Presenters
Jieying Lin
Southwest Jiaotong University, China (People’s Republic)

Zhiyue Liu
Southwest Jiaotong University

Ruixin Zhao (she/her/hers)
Southwest Jiaotong University, China (People’s Republic)

Jie Zhang
Southwest Jiaotong University, China (People’s Republic)

Van Viet Nguyen
Phenikaa University, Vietnam

Ge Zhao
Southwest Jiaotong University, China

In 19th-century Vietnam, a delicate and intriguing balance emerged among “Eastern Learning,” “Western Learning,” and “indigenous Nôm studies.” During this period, how to classify, integrate, and present the diverse “repositories of knowledge” built upon diﬀerent linguistic and cultural backgrounds, as well as how to eﬀectively disseminate this knowledge to a broader social spectrum and achieve deep integration of knowledge, became urgent topics for exploration. Throughout this process, the conﬂicts and fusion among diﬀerent intellectual systems not only reﬂected sociocultural transformations but also helped us trace the awakening of the power of reading communities.

This study will combine rich historical materials and adopt a perspective with greater historical depth to meticulously analyze the “norms” and “changes” within reading communities. Through in-depth exploration, we aim to uncover the speciﬁc trajectory of cultural development during Vietnam’s Nguyễn Dynasty, particularly the grassroots social dynamics reﬂected in the reading behaviors of ordinary readers. These studies will not only enhance our comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms of knowledge dissemination and reception in 19th-century Vietnamese society but also oﬀer new perspectives and insights for exploring the role of reading communities in sociocultural changes.

1: The Anthology Paradigm and the Unified Order of Knowledge: The Reading and Reception of Shen Deqian’s Anthologies of Poetry from Successive Dynasties by Vietnamese Literati in the Nguyen Dynasty from an East Asian Perspective
Jieying Lin
Southwest Jiaotong University, China (People’s Republic)

Compiled by Shen Deqian with the thematic focus of “elegance and orthodoxy,” theAnthologies of Poetry from Successive Dynasties reaﬃrmed and emphasized the signiﬁcance of poetic education, shaping the poetic trends from the Qianlong-Jiaqing period to the late Qing dynasty. Almost concurrently, various editions of these anthologies were introduced to Japan and the Korean Peninsula, eliciting strong reading responses among elite scholarly circles. It was not until the early 19th century that theAnthologies of Poetry from Successive Dynasties gradually entered the reading horizons of Vietnamese literati in the Nguyen Dynasty. The dissemination of these anthologies in the Nguyen Dynasty exhibited notable group-based diﬀerences: aristocratic elites regarded them as paradigmatic anthologies, comprehending and embracing Shen’s poetic theories through the compilation of large-scale poetry collections. Meanwhile, middle- and lower-class literati in the Nguyen Dynasty prioritized practical utility, transforming them into functional texts for imperial examinations and academic advancement through methods such as selective copying and adaptation. Derivative works, exempliﬁed by theAnthology of Ming Poetry, formed multiple mobile textual clusters, documenting the dynamic process by which Vietnamese Nguyen Dynasty literati constructed their knowledge framework for collected works. The strategies of reception and reading employed by literati across different social strata in the Nguyen Dynasty underscore the unique circulation characteristics of Shen Deqian’s anthologies in Vietnam. From these perspectives, the circulation and reception of theAnthologies of Poetry from Successive Dynasties in Vietnam not only fostered the development of Vietnam’s indigenous poetic system but also deeply engaged in the construction and expansion of the uniﬁed order of knowledge regarding Chinese poetry across successive dynasties among Vietnamese reading groups from various social strata.

2: An Enlightenment Primer in an Age of Change: The East Asian Journey of Xiaoxue Jizhu
Ruixin Zhao (she/her/hers)
Southwest Jiaotong University, China (People’s Republic)

From the perspective of East Asian Neo-Confucianism, the transmission of Xiaoxue Jizhu—Chen Xuan’s annotated commentary on Xiaoxue—unfolded across East Asia through three interconnected stages: acceptance, vernacular adaptation, and social diﬀusion. Shortly after its publication during the Ming and Qing dynasties, this text was designated as an oﬃcial primer in China, owing to its emphasis on moral cultivation. It was subsequently introduced into the educational systems of Japan, Joseon Korea, and Vietnam, where it became a foundational textbook in state-sponsored Confucian education. Through extensive vernacular glossing, phonetic annotation, and localized commentary, Xiaoxue Jizhu was reinterpreted within distinct cultural and linguistic contexts, thereby facilitating the broader dissemination of Zhu Xi’s moral philosophy among emerging literate classes and within children’s education. In the face of the social transformations and Western encroachment of the nineteenth century, the text was frequently reprinted and repurposed to preserve indigenous moral traditions and educational identity. By tracing the transnational trajectory of Xiaoxue Jizhu, this study reveals how a classical Confucian text was transformed into a pedagogical tool, reﬂecting both regional adaptations and broader continuities in East Asian moral education.

3: The Development and Transformation of Writing Systems in Vietnam’s Nguyễn Dynasty
Jie Zhang
Southwest Jiaotong University, China (People’s Republic)

The development and transformation of writing systems during the Nguyễn dynasty in Vietnam was not only changes in script forms but also a complex historical process shaped by political power, cultural identity, and national consciousness. In the early Nguyễn dynasty, compared to the Tây Sơn period, the status of Chinese characters was revitalized through educational reforms and consolidation of imperial power. The emperors promoted Chinese characters and Confucianvalues while suppressing Catholicism, which employed Chữ Nôm for missionary work. This policy inﬂuenced the trajectories of both scripts. In the mid-to-late 19th century, following unequal treaties with France, Chữ Nôm experienced a resurgence amid rising national consciousness and anti-colonial literary activity. From the late 19th to the early 20th century, French colonial policies facilitated the gradual replacement of Chinese characters and Chữ Nôm by the Latin-based Quốc Ngữ, which became Vietnam’s principal writing system. While Quốc Ngữ increased literacy, it also introduced new challenges to cultural identity. Late Nguyễn dynasty intellectuals foresaw this issue and proposed several writing systems reform plans, such as Quốc Âm Tân Tự and chữ quốc ngữ cổ, but these eﬀorts did not halt the ascendancy of Quốc Ngữ. How to maintain the cultural subjectivity and continuity in the face of modernization remains an enduring challenge for contemporary Vietnam and other post-colonial societies.

4: Textual Divergence and Transmission: A Comparative Study on the Manuscript Variants of Shihua Congyong (The Poems Collected During the Embassy to China) in Ancient Vietnam
Ge Zhao
Southwest Jiaotong University, China

During the Qianlong era (1735–1796) of the Qing Dynasty, the Vietnamese envoy Nguyễn Tông Khuê (Ruan Zongkui, 阮宗窐) undertook two diplomatic missions to China. His experiences resulted in the renowned poetry collection Shihua Congyong (The Poems Collected During the Embassy to China), which garnered significant acclaim in both Vietnam and China. Despite its importance, scholarly work on Nguyễn Tông Khuê’s biography and diplomatic activities remains hampered by inconsistencies and factual errors, largely stemming from insufficient engagement with primary sources. This study addresses this gap by conducting a critical textual analysis of extant manuscripts. Our research establishes that the earliest known manuscript of Shihua Congyong originates from a 1748 compilation edited by Li Bancun ( 李半村), which integrated the poet’s earlier and later collections. Through systematic comparison and collation of multiple manuscript copies – including holdings in Vietnam’s National Library (Shihua Congyong, Qianlong Jiazi Shihua Congyong), the Institute of Han-Nom Studies (Shihua Congyong, Shicheng Shiji), and a repatriated copy at Peking University Library – we identify and delineate at least three distinct transmission lineages for the text. These findings not only clarify the complex dissemination trajectory of Shihua Congyong within Vietnam and China but also significantly illuminate the mechanisms of transnational literary circulation for Vietnamese diplomatic writings in pre-modern East Asia.

Session 629: Slavery, Law, and Society: Intra-Asian Perspectives
Saturday, March 14, 2026
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 205

1: “Enslavement” in Early Modern Vietnam and Panduranga
Nhung Tran (she/her/hers)
University of Toronto, Canada

Drawing from Nguyen records and the archives of the royal family at Panduranga, this paper examines the category of “enslavement” in Panduranda, or what is now south central Vietnam. In addition to Nguyen state records, this paper examines contracts over enslaved persons who were bought, sold, and exchanged between Cham families, the Cham royal family, and the Nguyen regime in Cochinchina. It seeks to examine what the category of an enslaved person “halun klaoh,” or “nô lệ” meant in the eighteenth century by analyzing the duties, claims, and representations afforded these persons. What were the terms of enslavement between and among upland, Cham, and Vietnamese communities in the eighteenth century. What does the institution of enslavement used between these communities suggest about their relationship with one another and other upland and lowland communities around them? What do the purported testimonies of several enslaved persons, recorded in languages and scripts not their own, tell us about their lived experiences?

Session 635: From Marriage Promotion to Heterosexual Refusal:
The Social Consequences of Fertility Decline in East Asia
Saturday, March 14, 2026
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 211

2: Generative Laborers: Vietnamese Migrant Wives in South Korea and Taiwan
Phung N. Su
University of California, Santa Barbara, United States

Like most post-industrialized countries, South Korea and Taiwan have been on the path of fertility decline since the latter half of the 1900s. At present, South Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world whereas Taiwan is projected to step into this position by the year 2035. Fearful of a graying population, lawmakers in South Korea and Taiwan have sought various solutions, one of which lies in the contested immigration of migrant women from countries such as Vietnam to serve as wives for aging, bachelor men. This paper introduces the concept of “generative labor,” embedding it within a global system of heteropatriarchal reproduction. Here, “generative labor” is defined as migrant women’s simultaneous production of value for the labor economy and stabilization of masculinity in the heteropatriarchal family. From ethnographic and interviewing data with Vietnamese women in South Korea and Taiwan, I demonstrate how economic, social, and national values are co-produced through the agent of the Vietnamese migrant bride. Through their generative labor, migrant women extend masculine stability to the figure of a man without a partner and, in the process, maintain the success story that masculinized nation-states tell about themselves as viable economies with viable laboring bodies for the future.

Session 647: Global Health Imaginaries and Governance in Autocratic Southeast Asia
Saturday, March 14, 2026
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 302

4: Tracing Ideas of Place in the Governance of “Wet Markets” in Vietnam
Emma Willoughby
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Places give identity to social movements, and cultural life to neighborhoods. Places also create boundaries and formalize certain state responsibilities. Ideas about places known as “wet markets” have been promoted from Western actors since the emergence of COVID-19, yet there is no widely accepted public health deﬁnition of these places, nor clear evidence of their impact on public health. Starting from the narrative of “wet markets,” this paper develops a theory of place-based governance of markets. Comparing narratives promoted by key global health organizations in present-day Vietnam, with those of administrators of colonial French Indochina, the analysis relies on data on petty markets from interviews with global health scientists, in addition to primary historical archives and major secondary sources. The ﬁndings suggest that ideas of place can easily fulﬁll regime ideations, but may not empower the political rights of the traders who work there. Places create a visage of order. While global health actors seek to encourage health promotion for population health, evidence points to dualistic impact of this mostly Western-promoted narrative which may beneﬁt state interests more than those of the public.

Session 705: Rethinking Knowledge and Identity:
Intellectual Networks and Cultural Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Southeast Asia
Saturday, March 14, 2026
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PDT
Location: Pan Paciﬁc Hotel, Oceanview Suite 7

1: Imperial Triangulations: French, Japanese, and Vietnamese Voices in Wartime Museum and Anthropological Discourse
Pin-Hua Chou (she/her/hers)
University of California, Los Angeles, United States

This paper examines the reconﬁguration of museum exhibitions and anthropological practice in Vietnam during the period of dual Vichy French and Japanese colonization (1940-1945). Drawing on French-language sources from L’avenir du Tonkin and Vietnamese periodicals, I analyze how Japanese intervention forced French-dominated museums and anthropological institutions into new collaborative arrangements, creating a triangulation of imperial knowledge production. The study traces three interconnected developments: First, the establishment of French-Japanese institutional partnerships that fundamentally altered exhibition practices and research agendas. Second, the emergence of diﬀerent ethnological frameworks, exempliﬁed by Japanese ethnologist Matsumoto Nobuhiro’s 1943 publication Indoshina no minzoku to bunka 印度⽀那の⺠族と⽂化 (The Peoples and Cultures of Indochina), which oﬀered an alternative to French anthropological interpretations. Third, the unprecedented inclusion of Vietnamese scholarly voices in anthropological discourse, marking a shift from pure colonial extraction to more complex knowledge negotiations. By analyzing exhibition narratives, museum critiques, and anthropological research across France, Japan and Vietnam, this paper reveals how wartime conditions created spaces for Vietnamese agencies within competing imperial projects. While both French and Japanese administrators instrumentalized museums for imperial legitimacy, the dual administration inadvertently opened channels for Vietnamese intellectual participation that had been previously foreclosed. This research contributes to understanding how colonial knowledge production adapts under shifting political conditions and demonstrates the importance of examining Vietnamese perspectives alongside imperial narratives in exploring the dynamic interplay among France, Japan, and Vietnam.

2: Comparing Colonialisms and Inter-Imperial Imaginaries of the Philippines in Nam Phong Tap Chi
Alan R. Dai (he/him/his)
University of California, Los Angeles, United States

This paper explores how Vietnamese intellectuals understood their own colonial society and the workings of French empire during the 1920s and 1930s by writing about the Philippines. By examining the bilingual Vietnamese magazine Nam Phong tạp chí, I show how Vietnamese writers sought to use the case of the Philippines in various ways that belied the original expectations of the French colonial oﬃcials who sponsored the magazine. Vietnamese-language articles published in Nam Phong point to the Philippines as a model example of “benevolent” colonization in which a “civilized” country (the United States) seeks to “enlighten” a colonized people and train them how to be politically independent. Although these articles sing the praises of France in general, they also critique speciﬁc colonial policies that limited the political autonomy of France’s protectorates in Indochina. I also explore a Chinese-language story published in Nam Phong that depicts a ﬁctional granddaughter of José Rizal (national hero of the Philippines) as a globe-trotting anti-colonial activist ﬁghting for independence from the United States. Although this story does not mention Vietnam or France, its content is unmistakably subversive in its fawning portrayal of Filipino resistance against American empire. Thus, this paper not only shows how Nam Phong was much more than a propaganda tool of the French colonial government, but it also highlights how Vietnamese intellectuals conceptualized their national identity in relation to other Southeast Asian peoples and other Western empires during the early twentieth century.

Session 709: Living with Chronic Illness in Asia: Ethnographic Crossroads
Saturday, March 14, 2026
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PDT
Location: Pan-Paciﬁc Hotel, Oceanview Suite 6

4: Chronic Health Conditions and Intergenerational Time: Understanding How Families in Vietnam Live with Gestational Diabetes Mellitus
Tine Gammeltoft
University of Copenhagen, United States

Like many other chronic health conditions, gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is on the rise in Southeast Asia, aﬀecting an increasing number of pregnant women and families, and posing new challenges to pregnancy and postpartum care. Currently, Southeast Asia reports the world’s highest rates of GDM, yet little is known about how individuals and families live with the condition. Based on ethnographic ﬁeldwork conducted in northern Vietnam from 2023 to 2026, this paper explores how family experiences of GDM are intergenerationally shaped, emerging at an emotionally dense intersection of radically diﬀerent historical experiences. In the current era of rapid social and epidemiological change, generational pasts and presents diﬀer dramatically: while present-day pregnant women and their husbands confront dietary abundance and pressures to consume, grandparents had their children at a time of famine and scarcity. This paper examines how such diﬀerent generational experiences manifest within households and everyday life worlds, shaping local lives with GDM as a chronic health condition.

Session 735: Social Futurity: Creativity, Development, and Rethinking “Modern” Vietnamese Arts and Sciences
(Part 1: Scientific Imaginaries and the Promise of Progress)
Saturday, March 14, 2026
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 211

Organizer
Shani Tra (she/her/hers)
University of California, Riverside, United States

Chair
Sarah Grant
Anthropology
California State University, Fullerton, United States

Discussant
Annuska Derks
University of Zurich, Switzerland

Paper Presenters
Shani Tra (she/her/hers)
University of California, Riverside, United States

Phuc Le
University of Social Sciences and Humanities, United States

Allen Tran
Bucknell University, United States

Sarah Grant
Anthropology
California State University, Fullerton, United States

In contemporary Vietnam, the term sáng tạo (meaning both “creativity” and “innovation”) has become central to national discourses on development. Whether in policy, education, science, or the arts, sáng tạo is invoked as both a cultural value and an economic imperative. Yet the dual meaning of the term reflects a productive tension: innovation as technological and entrepreneurial transformation, and creativity as expressive, artistic, and often resistant practice. This two-part panel explores how sáng tạo is imagined, contested, and lived across Vietnam’s scientific and artistic fields. The first panel focuses on the sciences, medicine, and state-driven visions of innovation, asking how technocratic ideals shape social futures and public imaginaries. The second panel turns to the arts as a site where creativity resists or reframes dominant narratives of economic growth and development.

Innovation is heralded as a moral and economic imperative for “inclusive, smart, and sustainable” growth. Building on Annuska Derks’ (2022) work on the making of innovation in Vietnam’s Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), this panel examines the social imaginaries and infrastructures of business, science, technology, and medicine in a rapidly transforming society. Papers in this first session will examine the complex interplay between scientific innovation, healthcare, and political aspiration, probing how scientific expertise is mobilized, who benefits from innovation-driven policies, and how “progress” is made legible through Vietnam’s techno-nationalist ambitions. This panel questions whose futures are being imagined and made possible by analyzing state-driven science projects and the lived experiences of innovation.

1: Imagined Health: Shaping Health, COVID-19 Memories, and the Possibilities
Shani Tra (she/her/hers)
University of California, Riverside, United States

The Covid-19 pandemic profoundly reshaped daily life in Vietnam, particularly in Go Vap District, Ho Chi Minh City, where state responses to the outbreak overwhelmed existing healthcare infrastructures. This paper explores the challenges of conducting ethnographic research on a global health crisis after the fact, asking: What does it mean to care during and after a pandemic, and how are those memories narrated, politicized, and entangled with contemporary discourses of innovation? Drawing on interviews with frontline workers, healthcare workers and residents in southern Vietnam, I argue that practices and memories of care are not only personal but also shaped by the moral economies of state-led healthcare reform, shifting political economies, and evolving medical expertise. I view innovation as a central motif in Vietnam’s post-pandemic recovery, focusing on digital health, epidemiological surveillance, and types of health “innovation”. Engaging with theorists such as Maurice Halbwachs and Paul Connerton, I examine how collective memory shapes, and is shaped by, the state’s efforts to reimagine public health in an “innovative” Vietnam. Ultimately, I situate pandemic memory and care within broader debates on medical authority, national belonging, and the uneven futures of health innovation.

2: Digital Experiences of Older Adults in Vietnam
Phuc Le
University of Social Sciences and Humanities, United States

Vietnam promotes a comprehensive digital transformation on a national scale, the VssID (Digital Social Insurance) application has been deployed as a mandatory and nationwide synchronous technology platform to manage social insurance (SI), health insurance (HI) and unemployment insurance (UI) information. With the nature of universal public administration, VssID is designed based on the assumption of equal access to technology among the population. In reality, older adults – a rapidly growing population – often encounter technical obstacles and experience a range of emotional states when interacting with digital platforms. These experiences shape the way they use, refuse or adapt to the application. With more than 14.2 million people aged 60 and over (accounting for nearly 14.5% of the population), the ageing process in Vietnam poses an urgent need for equitable digital inclusion and user-centred design. This need is remarkably driven by the State’s project titled “Elderly people participate in promoting digital transformation, green transformation, entrepreneurship and job creation” in 2023 – an important policy step to empower older adults not only as beneficiaries but also as agents in the innovation and development process. The article employs “Technology as Experience” theoretical framework (McCarthy & Wright, 2004), which views technology not only as a tool but as a multidimensional experience that involves emotional, intellectual, and sensual interactions. I use digital ethnography to understand how the older adults in Vietnam experience, interpret, and adapt to VssID in their daily lives, identifying the emotions that shape their behaviour and relationships with digital administrative technology.

3: Intergenerational Difference/Trauma: Innovations and Experiments in the Psy-disciplines in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Allen Tran
Bucknell University, United States

Over the past decade, mental health treatment services have gained popularity among Ho Chi Minh City’s middle class, especially young people struggling to balance their personal ambitions with their parents and grandparents’ expectations. This paper examines how mental health care workers conceptualize the conflicts between clients and their families through the psy-disciplines. The relative lack of emotional intelligence among older generations who came of age before the contemporary psychoboom in Vietnam is often used by psychotherapists to frame social hierarchy and filial piety as potentially pathogenic. When members of clients’ families wish to be heavily involved in the therapeutic process, psychotherapists face multiple common ethical concerns in psychotherapy (e.g., protecting confidentiality, cultural sensitivity, and maintaining boundaries, among others). As mental health care workers increasingly use Western psychotherapeutic constructs (e.g., toxic relationships) to frame their clients’ situations, they introduce a conceptual and moral question: when does intergenerational difference become intergenerational trauma? Drawing on recent theorizing on relational ethics (Zigon 2023), I argue that a psychotherapeutic discourse of emotion and selfhood disrupts the relation between everyday experiences of morality and sociality and visions of the good life. Considering how mental health workers negotiate competing demands to achieve moral selfhood for themselves and their clients is an opportunity for psychological anthropologists to analyze the affective dimensions and implications of moral reasoning and decision making that are typically overlooked in anthropological theories of morality.

4: Coffee Grafting and the Paradox of Agricultural Progress
Sarah G. Grant
California State University, Fullerton, United States

This paper explores agricultural experimentation, specifically coffee grafting, in the Vietnamese coffee industry to understand expertise, climate change, and innovation as mutually constitutive processes. Coffee grafting is a horticultural technique that joins two coffee cultivars together to capitalize on the best attributes of both plants, ultimately creating a more resilient coffee for farmers and the state. In the case of most
Vietnamese coffee grafting (ghép cà phê) experiments, local coffee experts and agronomists are utilizing grafting as a form of pest and disease control, or most recently, as a climate change mitigation strategy. Ongoing drought in the Central Highlands has also shaped the way coffee “experts” respond to and innovate around coffee cultivars and soil science in ways that are fundamentally linked to state agricultural development initiatives. By examining these initiatives through the perspectives of farmers, state projects are revealed to be paradoxical – the very attempt to “develop” new resilient forms of coffee belies the lived experiences of farmers who are increasingly critical of the long-term sustainability of growing coffee in Vietnam.

Session 812: Community Revitalization Strategies across Asia:
How Can We Make Communities Resilient against Challenges?
Saturday, March 14, 2026
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 107/108

3: Starting up in Lam Dong’s Ethnic Minority Communities: Each Story, Its Own Path
Hien Nguyen T. M. (she/her/hers)
Dalat University, Vietnam

Lạc Dương Commune in Lâm Đồng province is primarily inhabited by ethnic minorities, with the Cil people making up over 80% of the population. The primary livelihood of the local people largely depends on traditional agriculture, while business startups remain a rare phenomenon, especially within the ethnic minority community. This paper uses a qualitative research method, focusing on the analysis of two case studies of ethnic minority entrepreneurs (one male, one female) and secondary document analysis. The goal is to clarify the historical context, the socio-cultural and economic transformations, and the community’s internal resources through each period. The results show that while entrepreneurship was not an initial strength, by proactively leveraging traditional knowledge, local resources, cultural factors, and the active participation of community members, these ethnic minority entrepreneurs achieved initial success. This success stemmed from the cultivation, processing, and consumption of coﬀee products with local characteristics. The brand-building story is linked to environmental protection practices, the changing roles of gender, and, in particular, the increasingly prominent role of knowledge in livelihood development. The startups faced challenges such as dependence on intermediaries, a lack of technical knowledge and market information, limited ﬁnancial management capacity, and diﬃculties in promotion and brand building. To ensure sustainable community development, collaboration is essential among the community, government, businesses, and experts to provide technical support, capacity building, product standardization, and sustainable market development.

4: Local Civil Society Organizations as Community Lifesavers in Response to COVID-19 Pandemic in Vietnam
Thi Viet Phuong Dang (she/her/hers)
Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Vietnam

The COVID-19 pandemic posed unprecedented challenges to communities across the globe, especially in countries with limited civic space. In Vietnam, where civil society operates under close state supervision, the crisis tested both the capacity and legitimacy of local civil society organizations (CSOs). This study investigates how CSOs supported communities in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi during the pandemic, particularly under prolonged lockdowns and restricted public activities. Based on a sample survey of 262 CSOs carried out in 2024, the paper explores the diverse strategies these organizations employed to mobilize resources and deliver aid in a politically constrained environment. The ﬁndings reveal a broad spectrum of responses. Mass organizations, supported by the state and embedded in local governance structures, primarily led government-coordinated relief eﬀorts. In contrast, NGOs and professional associations played critical roles in mobilizing community-based resources, drawing on their ﬂexibility and social capital. Despite facing regulatory constraints and mobility restrictions, many CSOs adapted rapidly and creatively, demonstrating resilience and innovation in sustaining community support initiatives. This study highlights the complex interplay between state control and civil society during crises, oﬀering insights into how organizational type, governance relationships, and access to resources shape civic actions. By focusing on Vietnam’s unique political and institutional context, the paper contributes to broader discussions on community-based disaster response and the evolving role of civil society in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes.

Session 823: Against the Tide:
Agency in Volatile Times for Southeast Asia
Saturday, March 14, 2026
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 121

1: Reimagining Decolonization: Vietnamese Youth’s Digital Activism and Grassroots Solidarity with Palestine
Linh Khanh Pham
Vietnam National University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam

This paper examines Vietnamese youth through digital discourses and grassroot movement is challenging and responding to the state dominant narrative about the on-going war in Gaza-stripe. Vietnam is in the position of expectation to share empathy toward Palestinians due to the global gaze toward the claim of similarity. However, adhering to Vietnam’s signature “bamboo diplomacy”— a foreign policy principle grounded in strategic ﬂexibility — the government has refrained from making any explicit endorsement of, or opposition to, either side in the Palestine-Israel conﬂict. This take enrages a group of young Vietnamese. Situated within a one-party state often perceived as politically uniﬁed, these youth mobilize under the banner of leftist activism, expressing solidarity with Palestine and reconﬁguring what it means to “decolonize” from within a nation long regarded as a symbol of anti-imperial victory. By analyzing social media campaigns, fundraising eﬀorts, art-making process and everyday discourse surrounding the #FreePalestine movement, the paper situates this phenomenon within Southeast Asia’s broader entanglement with neoliberal global forces, surveillance culture, and postcolonial memory. In doing so, it asks: the identity of young ‘leftist’ in Vietnam through examining pro-Palestine grassroot and social media-based activism? How do young people in Vietnam reclaim histories of resistance while navigating new terrains of state power, global solidarity, and digital governance? To what extent does this activism disrupt or reinforce Vietnam’s placement within global narratives of empire and conﬂict? How does Vietnamese youth situate their government’s standpoint and political identity nowadays?

Session 824: Art, Ideology, and Diplomacy: Cultural Cold War in East and Southeast Asia
Saturday, March 14, 2026
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 122

2: China’s Operatic Diplomacy: Performing Yue Opera in Vietnam and Hong Kong
Fei Su (she/her/hers)
Fudan University, China (People’s Republic)

Traditional opera played a signiﬁcant role in China’s cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. From February 17 to April 3, 1959, in accordance with the Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Cooperation Agreement, the Chinese Yue Opera Troupe, an all-female troupe led by renowned actresses Xu Yulan and Wang Wenjuan, visited the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. During this tour, the troupe staged 28 shows across nine provinces and cities in Vietnam, attracting over 200,000 spectators. Their repertoire included traditional operas such as Dream of the Red Chamber, Chasing The Carp Fairy, and The Legend of the White Snake, as well as modern revolutionary plays like The Party Member Registration Form. The performances of the Chinese Yue Opera Troupe in Vietnam reﬂected the aesthetic principles of socialist realism while also demonstrating China’s diplomatic strategy of using traditional love stories to convey the alliance and brotherhood between the two socialist nations. For similar political purpose, from December 20, 1960 to February 1, 1961, Shanghai Yue Opera Troupe, led by the renowned performers Yuan Xuefen, Xu Yulan and Wang Wenjuan, went on a tour in Hong Kong. The “depoliticized” pieces they performed, included The Romance of the Western Chamber, Dream of the Red Chamber, The Jade Hairpin and so forth, once again served as “soft-peddling propaganda” that showcased PRC’s respect for traditional culture and projected an appealing image of socialist modernity to diasporic Chinese audiences living in capitalist societies. The Hong Kong tour thus exempliﬁes the CCP’s strategic ﬂexibility in overseas propaganda.

Session 836: Social Futurity: Creativity, Development, and Rethinking “Modern” Vietnamese Arts and Sciences
(Part 2: Artistic Futures and the Limits of Creativity)
Saturday, March 14, 2026
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 211

Organizer
Tara Westmor (she/her/hers)
University of California, Riverside, United States

Chair
Chi Ha
University of California, Riverside, United States

Paper Presenter(s)
Tara Westmor (she/her/hers)
University of California, Riverside, United States

Le-Na Dao
University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam

Chi Ha
University of California, Riverside, United States

Nhã-Thuyên Đỗ (she/her/hers)
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam

Discussant
Ann Marie Leshkowich
College of the Holy Cross, United States

In contemporary Vietnam, the term sáng tạo (meaning both “creativity” and “innovation”) has become central to national discourses on development. Whether in policy, education, science, or the arts, sáng tạo is invoked as both a cultural value and an economic imperative. Yet the dual meaning of the term reflects a productive tension: innovation as technological and entrepreneurial transformation, and creativity as expressive, artistic, and often resistant practice. This two-part panel explores how sáng tạo is imagined, contested, and lived across Vietnam’s scientific and artistic fields. The first panel focuses on the sciences, medicine, and state-driven visions of innovation, asking how technocratic ideals shape social futures and public imaginaries. The second panel turns to the arts as a site where creativity resists or reframes dominant narratives of economic growth and development.

While scientific innovation in Vietnam is often aligned with economic growth and global prestige, creative and artistic innovation offers a parallel, and at times resistant, domain through which to critique, reflect on, and reimagine the nation’s development. This second panel discusses poetry, performance, and creative communities to explore how the arts engage with, and often trouble, the logics of market-driven innovation and state-led modernization. This panel examines how artists, writers, and cultural producers carve out alternative spaces of imagination that challenge dominant paradigms of economic rationality. Rather than rejecting development, these aesthetic forms reorient it, foregrounding other forms of social aspiration, collective care, and ethical relation that remain obscured in mainstream innovation discourses.

1: The Poetic Pulse of Development: Aesthetics, Resistance, and Economic Change in Vietnam
Tara Westmor (she/her/hers)
University of California, Riverside, United States

In post-Đổi Mới Vietnam, poetry has taken on an unexpected role: while often positioned as resistant to the logics of commercialization and economic growth, it simultaneously registers and responds to the pressures of market reform. This paper explores how poetic forms and practices have shifted in the wake of Vietnam’s economic liberalization, arguing that poetry functions as a cultural “pulse” that reflects deeper transformations in national development, aesthetics, and identity. Through close readings of contemporary Vietnamese poems and ethnographic fieldwork with poetry communities in Hà Nội and Hồ Chí Minh City, I examine how poets have engaged with global poetic styles as both an aesthetic innovation and a reflection of Vietnam’s evolving position in the global economy. Rather than being subsumed by creative industry logics, many poets strategically adopt these forms to critique commercialization, assert transnational belonging, or experiment with new modes of subjectivity. The shifting poetic landscape reveals how artists register changes in national tempo—adapting, refusing, and reworking what it means to be modern in a market-oriented (post)socialist state. This paper argues that poetry, though often dismissed as marginal or non-commercial, is a vital site for understanding how cultural production both resists and mirrors economic change. By tracing how poetic aesthetics evolve in tandem with Vietnam’s development trajectory, this project sheds light on the contradictions, tensions, and creativity at the heart of Vietnam’s cultural economy.

2: Reframing Innovation Through Aesthetic Resistance: Slow Cinema and Urban Disorientation in the Works of Phan Đăng Di and Hirokazu Kore-eda
Le-Na Dao
University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam

This paper contributes to current conversations on sáng tạo in Vietnam by examining how slow cinema reconﬁgures dominant discourses of innovation. Building on my existing research on Vietnamese ﬁlmmaker Phan Đăng Di, I explore how his ﬁlms – Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! (2010) and Mekong Stories (2015) – oﬀer an aesthetic resistance to the logics of state-led modernization and market-driven urban growth. Through fragmented narrative structures, minimal dialogue, and lingering depictions of fragile bodies drifting through cityscapes, Phan’s work foregrounds the aﬀective consequences of development: alienation, disorientation, and suspended futures. To further contextualize the aesthetics of resistance, the paper introduces a comparative dialogue with Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose ﬁlms such as Nobody Knows (2004) and Shoplifters (2018) similarly engage with care, memory, and precarity in post-industrial Japanese society. Both ﬁlmmakers center characters who are excluded from dominant imaginaries of economic success – children, the elderly, and the poor – while crafting cinematic worlds that prioritize slowness, vulnerability, and ethical attention over productivity or spectacle. Rather than rejecting development outright, these ﬁlms reorient its meaning by imagining social aspirations rooted in care, interdependence, and quiet survival. By juxtaposing Vietnamese and Japanese aesthetic responses to urban crisis, the paper aligns with this panel’s exploration of how creativity – in its expressive, slow, and socially engaged form – oﬀers an alternative to technocratic or entrepreneurial framings of innovation. In doing so, it contributes to trans-Asian conversations on the limits of sáng tạo and the power of artistic imagination.

3: Dressing Modernities: The Politics of Heritage Preservation and Eco-consumption in Vietnam’s Creative Economy
Chi Yen Ha
University of California, Riverside, United States

This paper focuses on indigenous practices of dress and fashion within Vietnam’s contemporary landscape of cultural and creative economy (CCE) and growing eco-consumption trends over the past decade. I will explore two divergent interpretations of “modernity” through the lens of indigenous Hmong textile practices in Vietnam: the reproduction of the Hmong dress and patterns with mass-produced materials – oriented towards domestic and diasporic Hmong customers, and the application of Hmong traditional materials and techniques to non-traditional designs – mostly geared towards Kinh and foreign customers. The preferences of these audiences demonstrate different visions of modernity based on what they consider its opposite – “tradition,” and how they think it should be combined with novelty or creativity to produce a desirable form of modernity. While both can be considered “alternative modernities” (Gaonkar 1999) that seek to unsettle the hegemonic colonialist/modernist version, they are not without structural inequalities and colonial logics. Drawing on Fabian (1984)’s notion of “denial of coevalness,” I argue that the complexity of these alternative modernities in the dual pursuit of creativity and preservation not only problematizes the universality of “modernity” as a historical colonial project, but also reveals hierarchies within the very resistance to it.

4: Up\rooted: Drifting with and Moving Inward to the Poetics of Vietnamese Utterances
Nhã-Thuyên Đỗ (she/her/hers)
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam

What does it mean to be a Vietnamese writer? What counts as Vietnamese literature—and who decides? These questions emerge from my personal introspection and a long-standing discomfort with exclusionary deﬁnitions of Vietnamese literature that overlook the historical and ongoing periphery presence of exiled, diasporic, and silenced voices. This research delves into the complex sense of belonging and drifting within global diasporas, examining how language evolves as a survival strategy. How might my practice as a poet, essayist and editor be used to understand, engage with and curate the varied expressions of uprooted Vietnamese literary communities? What role can poetry and poetry in translation play in articulating experiences of belonging, home, and voice? By exploring the politics and the poetics of reading marginalised Vietnamese literature, and aiming to understand its pluralistic and fragmented historical and cultural entity, this project proposes a duo voyage: “moving outward” to investigate the politics and poetics of overseas writers, and “returning inward” to attune to the politics and poetics of the poets in Vietnam, accompanied by the ﬂuid poetics of the Vietnamese language.

Session 847: Marginalization, Violence, and Conﬂicts
Saturday, March 14, 2026
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 222

2: Sanctuaries of Sovereignty: Theravā da Buddhism and Political Belonging Among the Khmer Krom in Vietnam
Sopanha Bunthoeun (he/him/his)
Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

This paper explores how Theravāda Buddhist monasteries serve as both spiritual sanctuaries and political spaces for the Khmer Krom—an Indigenous Khmer community in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. While the Vietnamese state ofﬁcially recognizes the Khmer as an ethnic minority, the Khmer Krom face persistent marginalization through linguistic assimilation, limited religious autonomy, and the erasure of Indigenous identity. In this context, monasteries function not only as religious institutions but also as sites of cultural resilience, informal governance, and mediated political expression. Drawing on ethnographic ﬁeldwork in Ho Chi Minh City and provinces in the Mekong Delta, this study investigates how Khmer Krom monks and laypersons engage in subtle forms of resistance and identity-making through monastic education, ritual practice, and the spatial use of Khmer language. As Khmer is largely excluded from state-run schools, monasteries provide alternative pathways for language transmission and ethnic cohesion. At the same time, these sacred spaces mediate complex political relations—both with the Vietnamese state and with Cambodia—by offering a socially sanctioned platform for expressing Khmer identity within state-imposed religious boundaries. Engaging with linguistic landscape theory and the concept of language ideology, the paper argues that Khmer Theravāda Buddhist practices in Vietnam operate within a framework of negotiated sovereignty. Monasteries emerge as arenas of cultural citizenship where political belonging is shaped through ritual, memory, and everyday speech. In highlighting the monastery’s role as both a spiritual and sociopolitical institution, the paper reveals how religious practice becomes a mode of political engagement for a stateless Indigenous community navigating competing forms of authority.

Session 901: Transforming Asia with Food:
Women and Everyday Life (Roudtable)
Saturday, March 14, 2026
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM PDTLocation: Pan Paciﬁc Hotel, Oceanview Suite 1

Discussants include:
Christina Firpo
California Polytechnic State University, United States

This Roundtable explores how women eﬀected change across Asia engaging in everyday practices of food production, handling, preparation, consumption and entrepreneurship; participants bring to light how such “domestic” practices had signiﬁcant impact on “public spaces” in a variety of locales across Asia: participants will oﬀer reﬂections on colonial-era Vietnam and Indonesia, as well as Malaysia and the Chinese diaspora in America. We propose an interdisciplinary and transtemporal analysis in which women—which we see as a heterogenous category, intersecting with class, education, race, etc.—displayed autonomous agency. We argue that these daily practices, in which many women played a central role, restructured familial, social, cultural, and at times political relations in the transition to “modernity.” Over the past few decades, the study of food has burgeoned and attracted increasing scholarly attention. However, we see a stark polarization across geographic foci and disciplinary engagements. This Roundtable scrutinize the centrality of women’s role, labor, everyday care, and expertise involving food as a factor in social and cultural transformations, cutting across the geographical and temporal divisions in Asia at large. Panelists will build on on-going engagements (at workshops and the 2025 AAS meeting in Columbus) and expand the purview of such conversations through audience participation. C.Firpo examines the role of food consumerism in shaping gendered expressions of middle-class modernity in Vietnam (1920-1940)

Session 920: Cambodia and Vietnam:
Evolving Strategies for Authoritarian Survival in Domestic and Foreign Policies
Saturday, March 14, 2026
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 118

Organizer & Chair
Tuong Vu (he/him/his)
University of Oregon, United States

Discussant
Astrid Norén-Nilsson (she/her/hers)
Lund University, Sweden

Paper Presenters & Co-Presenters
Chheang Vannarith (he/him/his)
Angkor Social Innovation Park, Cambodia

Nhu Truong (she/her/hers)
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

Sreang Chheat (he/him/his)
Cambodia Development Resource Institute, Cambodia

Mark Mun Vong (he/him/his)
Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Thiem Bui (he/him/his)
Malmö University, Sweden

Cambodia and Vietnam’s traditionally close relationship has recently frayed due to rising tensions in the South China Sea and China’s increasing influence on Cambodia that unsettles Vietnam. At the same time, the two former Communist comrades seem to stick together thanks to not only past ideological solidarity but also shared regime character and survival interests. As they navigate a changing world, Cambodia and Vietnam’s ruling parties with aging leaders have adapted their political systems to enhance control. Hun Sen, the longstanding leader of the Cambodian People’s Party, has successfully passed on the Prime Ministership to his son. Vietnam witnessed the rise to dominance of Security Police officials in the Communist Party’s Politburo. Both regimes have become much more repressive toward dissent and civil society.

This panel brings together international experts (one each from Cambodia, Singapore, and South Africa, and two each from Australia, Sweden, and the US) to examine novel and recalibrated strategies for authoritarian survival in Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as the evolving relations between the countries. What have been the key dynamics in the evolution of these authoritarian regimes’ strategies to cope with domestic and foreign challenges? How do they continue to legitimize authoritarian rule amid pressures for democratization? How have they been influenced by China’s model and constrained by the US-China rivalry? The panel hopes to contribute to scholarship on the domestic politics and foreign policies of Cambodia and Vietnam and to further the comparative study of their Communist and post-Communist characteristics and legacy.

1: Navigating a Turbulent World: Cambodia’s Relationship with Vietnam and Laos
Chheang Vannarith (he/him/his)
Angkor Social Innovation Park, Cambodia

This paper applies the concepts of authoritarianism and sub-regionalism to analyze Cambodia’s foreign policy towards Laos and Vietnam and the trilateral relationship among Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam. It argues that Cambodia’s foreign policy towards Laos and Vietnam reflects deep traditional ties among the three political parties and governments. As an authoritarian regime, Cambodia’s foreign policy is directed toward the goals of regime survival and maintaining legitimacy through economic development, but Cambodia’s foreign policy is also shaped by pragmatism, rules-based, people-centered, and regionalism.

2: Party to Party, Heart to Heart: Communist Legacies and Prerogatives in Southeast Asia
Nhu Truong (she/her/hers)
University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

From party to party and heart to heart, are communist and post-communist autocracies more intrinsically bound to each other? To what extent are the Vietnamese Communist Party, the Cambodian People’s Party, and the Chinese Communist Party uniquely positioned to engage with one another vis-à-vis party-to-party pathways? The democracy-versus-autocracy paradigm has been raised from post-Cold War ashes like Lazarus from the dead. In some way, the superimposition of this paradigm with U.S.-China competition in the region has surpassed calculable national security interests. Rather, the paradigm has pitched one regime system against another, with unforeseen endgame. Through this lens, the fates of communist and post-communist regimes could appear to be tied. This article argues instead that the rigor of communist ties and party-to-party engagements among Vietnam and Cambodia with China are highly contingent on the varied institutionalization of their ruling party. Speciﬁcally, the article traces and compares the character of and the extent to which their party-to-party diplomacy outlasts leadership transitions, and the party’s sensitivity to popular domestic sentiments on salient foreign policy issues. Despite their intersecting histories, their communist legacies, conceptions of security, and prerogatives vary signiﬁcantly. Understanding the complex constellation of communist legacies and diﬀering institutionalization of the Vietnamese Communist Party, the Cambodian People’s Party, and the Chinese Communist Party suggests that U.S. engagement in Southeast Asia cannot operate singularly on the fault line of democracy versus autocracy, which is not to say that democracy does not matter.

3: Engineering Obedience: Authoritarian Innovations and Adaptation in Vietnam
Thiem Hai Bui (he/him/his)
Malmö University, Sweden
Co-Author
Khac Giang Nguyen (he/him/his)
ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Australia

Vietnam’s contemporary authoritarian governance has evolved beyond traditional coercive mechanisms, developing sophisticated practices that systematically exclude dissent, centralize power, and constrain citizen participation through strategic information control and deliberate restrictions on political discourse. This chapter examines Vietnam’s distinctive authoritarian innovations within the context of its one-party communist system, building upon Morgenbesser’s (2020) analytical framework of sophisticated authoritarianism in Southeast Asia. The analysis reveals that Vietnam’s authoritarian innovations operate across five interconnected dimensions: informational (strategic control of narratives and data flows), legal (instrumentalization of law for political control), political (co-optation and institutional manipulation), reputational (image management domestically and internationally), and technological (digital surveillance and online control mechanisms). These innovations represent both adaptations of regional authoritarian practices — particularly those observed in China — and genuinely indigenous responses to Vietnam’s specific ideological foundations and structural constraints. By tracing the origins and the impacts of Vietnam’s authoritarian innovations, this chapter contributes to understanding how single-party states maintain resilience and adaptability amid evolving internal pressures and external challenges. The Vietnamese case demonstrates that authoritarian innovation is not merely about regime survival, but involves the proactive reconfiguration of state-society relations to pre-empt opposition while maintaining the appearance of responsive governance.

Session 927: Cold War and Reformulations of Southeast Asia:
Contested Community and State Formations Under Pressure of Decolonization and the Global Cold War
Saturday, March 14, 2026
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 204

1: Reformulating Chinese-ness: French Colonial Power and Chinese Communities in Indochina During the First Indochina War, 1946-54
Igor Iwo Chabrowski (he/him/his)
University of Warsaw, Poland

This paper analysis reformulation of the Chinese community in the French Indochina during the last decade of the colonial rule, between 1945-54. My main question is about the reason for the two interlinked processes: the politicization of Chinese life in Indochina and the growing oppressive pressure of the administrative and police means on the overseas Chinese community. In other words, why and how Chinese social and political life transformed in Indochina? And, why and how, French colonial rule, previously often indirect and distant, turned into a police state? I will answer these questions ﬁrstly by giving a short outline on how the WWII in Asia transformed the legal standing of the Chinese community under French rule; and how Chinese question grew to be an independent problem area on the sidelines of the confrontation between France and Viet-minh. Secondly, I will outline two ways in which colonial authorities reformulated Chinese communities, i.e. by trying to recreate a docile, Chinese subject whose supposedly innate cultural qualities precluded infatuation with communist ideology. And, by exponential increase in police and intelligence work, which eventually, by the beginning of 1950s, turned the previously often symbiotic relation between the colonizer and a privileged alien (as one may describe the role of Chinese in Indochina), into that of the anxious oppressor and a suﬀocated but the potentially dangerous Other. Finally, I will underline the importance of the First Indochina War not only for the Vietnamese, but also for the Overseas Chinese resident in what is today Vietnam.

Session 934: Sacred Authority and the Politics of Belonging in Asia and Its Diasporas
Sponsored by Council of Conferences (COC)
Saturday, March 14, 2026
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 212

4: The God and the Prophet: Making Kim Il Jung and Ho Chi Minh Sacred
Thu Nguyen (she/her/hers)
McGill University, Canada

Cults of personality have played a significant role in the survival of authoritarian regimes worldwide. Authors of these cults use vocabularies that have religious connotations. Nevertheless, few have analyzed them using a religious framework. This paper intends to explore cults of personality using Émile Durkheim’s concept of the sacred in religions. This paper seeks to argue that two authoritarian regimes, North Korea and Vietnam, constructed sacred figures from their founding fathers, Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh, differently. It first compares the degree to which they implement similar techniques, namely statue building and ritualistic musicality. It then points to their different techniques in creating the distance between the sacred leader and the profane public. It concludes by arguing that the dif erence between the two cults created different kinds of legitimacy, with Kim’s legitimacy being personalistic and Ho’s collectivistic.

Session 1010: Elemental Entanglements: Water, Wood, and Earth in Vietnam
Saturday, March 14, 2026
5:45 PM – 7:15 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 118

Organizer
Kathryn Dyt (she/her/hers)
SOAS University of London, United Kingdom

Chair
Edyta Roszko (she/her/hers)
Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway

Paper Presenters
Kathryn Dyt (she/her/hers)
SOAS University of London, United Kingdom

Edyta Roszko (she/her/hers)
Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway

David Biggs (he/him/his)
University of California, Riverside, United States

Discussant
Michitake Aso (he/him/his)
University at Albany, SUNY, United States

This panel explores how the elemental substances of water, wood, and earth have shaped social and political life in Vietnam across time and space. Inspired by Achille Mbembe’s turn towards the planetary and invitation to attend to the world in its multiplicity, in both its animate and inanimate forms, the panel highlights how materials and environments have informed human histories.
Drawing on historical, ethnographic, and visual sources, the papers examine the central role of these elements in the development of infrastructures, energy systems, mobility, spiritual geographies, and territorial claims. They trace how human engagements with water, wood, and earth generated knowledge, enabled movement, and structured relations of power. The contributions move across subterranean, surface, and atmospheric realms: from underground aquifers that sustained seafaring networks and linked distant islands; to contrasting interpretations of the earth’s depths in Vietnamese geomancy and colonial geology; to the energy crises of wartime Saigon, where charcoal, alcohol, and wood replaced fossil fuels and reconﬁgured urban life.

Together, the panel foregrounds locally grounded epistemologies and overlapping temporalities—spiritual, historical, and geological—that gave meaning and form to the material world. Material relations with water, wood, and earth were embedded in colonial, national, and regional histories, linking wells to sea routes, forests to cities, and subterranean visions to political authority. In exploring these elemental entanglements, the panel oﬀers new ways of seeing Vietnam’s past through its natural and material worlds.

1: Subterranean Sight: Competing Visions of the Earth in Vietnam
Kathryn Dyt (she/her/hers)
SOAS University of London, United Kingdom

This paper explores how diﬀerent visual and conceptual frameworks rendered the earth’s depths visible and knowable in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Vietnam. In the late nineteenth century, the French geological mission sought to make the subsoil legible through mapping strata, rock formations, and mineral deposits. This eﬀort reﬂected a broader shift in colonial science that Braun (2000) describes as “seeing geologically”—a move from reading the earth’s surface to mapping and apprehending what lay beneath. This reﬁgured the earth as a vertically ordered object of extraction and control. Through maps and visual regimes, the French colonial apparatus embedded Indochina within global narratives of geological development and economic potential. Yet other ways of seeing the subterranean long predated colonial scientiﬁc interventions. In the early nineteenth century, and in earlier periods as well, Vietnamese geomantic diagrams charted hidden veins and ﬂows beneath the surface, aligning human activity and political fate with the vital energies coursing through the land. Reading these diagrams with ‘divine vision’ (thần nhãn), trained geomancers discerned unseen forces to determine where to build, bury, and bolster power. Drawing on colonial geological maps and Vietnamese geomantic texts, this paper examines vertical epistemologies; it considers how the underground was made legible through contrasting regimes of vision and interpretation. It traces how these modes of seeing—the extractive, stratigraphic gaze of geology and the relational, cosmographic vision of geomancy—shaped competing claims to land and power.

2: Underground Waterways: Connecting Social, Ecological, and Temporal in the Hydrology of Vietnamese Small Islands
Edyta Roszko (she/her/hers)
Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway

In the humanities and social sciences, oceans or navigable rivers have been seen as sites of connection and history-making. However, the unifying role played by small underground ‘waterways’ that integrated small tropical islands in the oceans and along the coasts has often been overlooked. Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological ﬁeldwork, I take a closer look at Phú Quý Island oﬀ the coast of south-central Vietnam. Although not directly located on the historically important maritime trade routes linking Champa—a Malay seafaring polity on the coast of what is now central Vietnam—with southern China and the Malay World, the island was important to Cham and local seafarers. Ancient Cham wells on Phú Quý and other small islands along the coast provided crucial freshwater in the past, enabling seafaring, ﬁsheries, and trade in forest and sea products. These islands became part of a broader network of wells that supplied fresh water not only to local sailors but also to Malay, Arab, Persian, and other seafarers from the 13th–14th centuries onward. In the absence of rivers, submarine groundwater ﬂows have continued to sustain Phú Quý’s growing population into the present. Against the backdrop of terrestrial and marine connectivity, I argue that subterranean and submarine ﬂows—or, in anthropological terms, freshwater wells—not only link tidal cycles and terrestrial permeability, but also connect diﬀerent geographies, mobilities, and forms of knowledge. Interconnecting human and natural processes that aﬀect freshwater ﬂows, I explore the hydrology of Phú Quý Island through historical, contemporary, and future-oriented practices.

3: The Wood War: WW2 Fuel Shortages and the Geo-Politics of Biofuel in Saigon-Cholon
David Biggs (he/him/his)
University of California, Riverside, United States

On May 3rd and 4th, 1945, American heavy bombers from the Philippines dropped 122 tons of bombs on Saigon’s boatyards and oil storage facilities at Nha Be, destroying 90% of the targets and eliminating the city’s oil supply. The blow was signiﬁcant but not devastating, however, since Saigon-Cholon’s energy economy had, for more than a decade, been starved of fossil fuels. People and businesses largely made do with wood and plant fuels, especially wood charcoal, much as they had since many industries were founded in the 19th century. Japanese, Vietnamese, ethnic-Chinese, and French ﬁrms merged modern energy needs with the older biomass economy by improvising internal combustion engines to run on wood gas, and by reﬁning sugar and rice into ethanol and aviation gas to fuel cars and airplanes. This paper explores how wartime conditions revitalised long-standing biomass networks, while also exposing the fragility and environmental costs of this improvised energy regime. The war-induced biomass economy had far-reaching and severe repercussions, including famine and forest destruction. Wartime shortages focused state attention on decades of deforestation, and brought to light the importance of remote mangroves and lowland forests—future bases for the communist resistance—which were deeply embedded in Saigon-Cholon’s urban life and war eﬀort. The acute demand for biofuels between 1930 and 1945 highlighted the geo- and ethno-politics of energy in the city, as ethnic-Chinese ﬁrms had, for more than a century, dominated Saigon-Cholon’s biomass trade—mirroring patterns found in other port cities across Southeast Asia.

Session: Emigrant Citizenship in Asia:
Nationalism, Identities and Forms of Governance
Saturday, March 14, 2026
5:45 PM – 7:15 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 119

3: Unmasking the Tenuous “Social Contract”: A Study of the Intended and Actual Outcomes of the Instruments Utilized by the Vietnamese State to Govern Its Temporary Absent Citizens
Robin Ming Feng Chee
Singapore Management University, Singapore

To address issues of brain drain, the Vietnamese state has introduced several schemes to attract returning skilled migrants. These include oﬀering overseas scholarships with generous monthly stipends (which include the guarantee of a full-time permanent position upon return) and installing partnership schemes where trained executives are sent to Asian states such as Taiwan, Japan and Singapore for long-term overseas attachments. However, few studies explore how the Vietnamese government supports these temporary absent citizens and shape their future actions. By illuminating both the regimental protocols and normative guidelines imposed by the state on these citizens, the paper illustrates how state agencies have adopted and re-deﬁned the central tenets of the “social contract”. While the state has established laws to protect and incentivised these citizens (such as by ensuring fair recruitment, prohibiting illegal brokerage fees and oﬀering cheap housing and language-training loans), they are also expected to fulﬁl certain obligations such as respecting the laws and norms of the host nation, reporting to the home embassies regularly, organising party-aﬃrming activities in their host societies and paying a monthly fee for those aﬃliated with the communist party. Through the detailed analysis of Vietnamese state policies governing temporary absent citizens and in-depth interviews with 25 Vietnamese respondents (with a mix of students on state scholarships and executives on state sponsorships overseas) working in Singapore procured through purposive and snowball sampling, this study will uncover the potential diﬀerences between the intended objectives of the protocols implemented by the state and the actual outcomes of these instruments.

Session 1013: From Birds and Bees to Medicines and Love Potions:
The Cultural Worlds of Southeast Asian Forest Products
Saturday, March 14, 2026
5:45 PM – 7:15 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 121

1: Looking to the Skies: Birds and Bird Products in the Vietnamese Historical Record
George E. Dutton (he/him/his)
University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Scholars who focus on Vietnamese animals are usually drawn to elephants, horses, or water buffalo – larger mammals with their dramatic presence and outsize impact on historical events. This paper argues for the importance of other, often-overlooked creatures, taking up the case of one category of animal that is not earth-bound, namely birds. While little featured in modern scholarship, birds have made regular appearances in the Vietnamese historical record. There is, for example, a lengthy list of birds in the 19th-century Vietnamese official gazetteers, suggesting their importance to scholars chronically relevant flora and fauna. An examination of the larger historical record shows the diverse ways in which birds mattered to Vietnamese people. Some were important for their byproducts like salangane nest soup (with its purported health benefits), while others, like kingfishers and peacocks featured colorful feathers, which served as gifts of tribute to neighboring states. But birds also had other sorts of cultural significance, serving as omens or portents of change or disaster, or were used for village entertainments such as cockfighting. Birds also make appearances in Vietnamese literature from short verse to epic poetry, such as The Tale of Kieu. My paper seeks to elaborate their significance within the larger context of the Vietnamese animal world and how they were regarded and perceived by humans and historians.

2: Medicalized Invertebrates: Damage, and Potential Damage, to the Backbone of Southeast Asian Ecosystems
C. Michele Thompson (she/her/hers)
Southern Connecticut State University, United States

When people think of the use of animals in traditional systems of medicine what springs to mind is megafauna such as rhinoceros, bears, and sharks. However, invertebrates and products from invertebrates have been used in Asian systems of medicine since the earliest records of materia medica from the region. In terms of their role in the food chain, and their role as pollinators, invertebrates are as crucial to the health of ecosystems in Asia and elsewhere as the megafauna at the top of food chains. While loss and degradation of habitat is probably aﬀecting more invertebrates than medicalization, such medicalization, and an expansion of medicalization beyond Asia is contributing to the danger many populations of invertebrates currently face. This paper will give an overview of the “categories” for invertebrates in Vietnamese Traditional Medicine and will move to a case study of two varieties of honey, and beeswax producing bees found in northern mainland Southeast Asia and southern China: Apis dorsata F. and Apis cerana. Both of these species are in all probability important pollinators and the fact that I can only say that they are “probably” important pollinators indicates how little research has been done on them. Recent decades have seen an increase in popularity of foods and supplements perceived as ‘healthy’ and a demand that these products be produced from the ‘wild.’ Honey and beeswax are two of these products and this demand is putting pressure on wild bee populations with unknown consequences for the plants they pollinate.

3: The Traveling Life of Medicine Between China and Vietnam in the Early Twentieth Century
Thao Nguyen (she/her/hers)
Independent Scholar, United Kingdom

Research on the movement of herbal medicine between China and Vietnam has often focused on tributary relations, in which raw materials such as local varieties of betel nut (binglang) and cloves (dingxiang) made their way from the southern region to the court in the north. This paper investigates this movement in reverse, focusing on the movement of Chinese materia medica, packaged as ready-to-use pellets, salves, oils, and powders by Nhị Thiên Đường (Ertian Tang), a transregional pharmaceutical ﬁrm of Sino-Vietnamese origins, to Vietnam throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Then a French colony, Vietnam was undergoing a medical transition, as the colonial government worked to establish biomedical institutions and the people navigated the diﬀerences between this and their long-held local practices. Trust between patients and Western-style doctors was diﬃcult to establish, and self-medication, which often combined biomedical and herbal remedies, became an increasingly popular solution for many. Amidst this environment, Nhị Thiên Đường marketed its medicine as an incorporation of diﬀerent strands of medical knowledge, capable of treating a variety of modern needs: using material from China but processing them to be suitable for Vietnamese bodies, addressing issues such as depression due to over-competition in an increasingly mobile world, and making medicine portable for traveling. The mobility of materia medica was thus a marker of a modern and transregional awareness, at once a reﬂection of how people and products traversed empires more and more, and of how people sought to navigate and survive this increasingly competitive world.

SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 2026

Session 1105: Liberal Economists and Liberal Economic Ideas in Vietnam
Sunday, March 15, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 112

Organizer
Tuong Vu (he/him/his)
University of Oregon, United States

Chair
Alex-Thai Vo (he/him/his)
Texas Tech University, United States

Discussant
Peter Zinoman (he/him/his)
University of California, Berkeley, United States

Paper Presenters
Thanh Nguyen (he/him/his)
Vietnam Economic and Strategic Studies Center, Vietnam

Thanh Nguyen (he/him/his)
Yale University, United States

Ha Pham (she/her/hers)
Vietnam Institute of History, United States

Scholars have often described Vietnam’s political and economic transformations since the 1980s as a pragmatic adaptation to the world capitalist economy and the post-Cold War international order. Meanwhile, ofﬁcial accounts of Vietnam’s transition often credit the impact of “new thinking” that led the Vietnamese Communist Party to adopt the 1980s reform policies known as Renovation. In both cases, however, few studies exist to detail the career of alternative currents of political and economic thought in the Vietnamese context. Against this background, this panel offers new interpretations of the sources, impacts, strengths and limits of liberal ideas in twentieth-century Vietnam. The papers contribute to two recent scholarly developments. Scholars of Vietnamese intellectual history have started to expand from an earlier focus on nationalism, revolution, and the artistic-cultural intelligentsia to examine competing ideas about modernization and development across the twentieth century and the global and regional contexts of those visions. Meanwhile, scholars of (post)socialism and (neo)liberalism have re-evaluated the career of liberal ideologies in such contexts as the Soviet Union and China, but left the comparative experience of Vietnam underexplored. Together, the papers in this panel—an economist’s reﬂection on the reception of Adam Smith in Vietnam across the twentieth century, an intellectual biography of Vietnam’s ﬁrst Keynesian liberal economist, and an account of the little-known contribution of technocrats and managers from the former capitalist Republic of Vietnam to the country’s market reforms in the 1980s—aim to facilitate new conversations on the historical roots and contemporary implications for Vietnam’s ongoing transformations.

1: The Reception of Adam Smith in Vietnam: Historical Observations and Political Economy Implications
Thanh D. Nguyen (he/him/his)
Vietnam Economic and Strategic Studies Center, Vietnam

This paper examines the early awareness and subsequent reception of Adam Smith’s liberal principles within the Vietnamese context, tracing their inception from the initial appearance in a small Vietnamese tract (1928) following Chinese reformer Liang Qichao’s pamphlet (1902) introducing Western economic thoughts to the ﬁrst and only incomplete translation (so far) of the Wealth of Nations published during Vietnam’s Renovation period in the early 1990s. By conducting a comparative analysis of the dissemination and adoption of Adam Smith’s principles regarding free market economy and political liberalism on a global and regional scale, it becomes evident that Vietnam’s reception of these ideas commenced considerably later, lacking deliberate assimilation by intellectuals and national leaders. Notably, Smith’s ideas underwent substantial distortion and devaluation when interpreted through the lens of Marxist-Leninist literature. Furthermore, they receded into obscurity within contemporary leftist ideologies, particularly in cases where their reception remained unaffected by Marxist-Leninist doctrines. Consequently, the genuine essence of Adam Smith’s liberal ideologies, along with those of other traditional liberal thinkers, remained inadequately comprehended in Vietnam. My ﬁndings indicate that the intellectual or academic appreciation of the roles played by free markets and political liberties failed to take root in Vietnam over the past century. This observation might contribute to explaining the persistence of collectivist ideologies, notably Marxist-Leninist communism, within the country’s public sphere to the present day.

2: Renovating Development: Nguyễn Xuân Oánh and the Economic Liberalization of Vietnam
Thanh Nguyen (he/him/his)
Yale University, United States

This paper revisits the career of the Vietnamese economist and businessman Nguyễn Xuân Oánh to illustrate the role ideas about development played in the transformation of Vietnam’s socialist model in the 1980s. A Western-trained technocrat who served the Saigon government in the 1960s, Nguyễn Xuân Oánh’s vision of development was shaped by Keynesian economics, the observed predicaments of newly decolonized countries, and the war in South Vietnam. While a lifelong free market ideologue, he also had a holistic understanding of development as a process that was both urgent and perpetual and mutually imbricated with politico-security concerns. When he was rehabilitated and given an advisory role by Hanoi in the 1980s, Oánh helped push forward liberalizing market reforms under the banner of socialist development. As Vietnam ran into economic problems at home while mired in the Third Indochina War, its leaders retreated from immediate socialist transformation both North and South and theoretically elaborated a longer transitional stage. Postponed towards the future, legitimized by economic growth in the present, while heavily emphasizing social stability and regime security, Vietnam’s post-reform socialist model and Oánh’s vision of development bore important parallels. This paper complements scholarship that shows how development supplanted revolution as the center of the late-Cold War socialist project around the world, especially in the Global South.

3: The Resilience of Liberal Economic Ideas and Their Contributions to Vietnam’s Market Reform in the 1980s
Ha H. Pham (she/her/hers)
Vietnam Institute of History, United States
Co-author
Tuong Vu (he/him/his)
University of Oregon, United States

Using archival, newspaper, and interview sources, this paper focuses on the unexpected contributions of liberal economic ideas to Vietnam’s market reform in the 1980s. During the Cold War, Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel. The communist regime in North Vietnam adopted the Stalinist-Maoist economic model in contrast with the Republican government in the South supporting a capitalist economy. When the two regions were uniﬁed under communist rule in 1975, the northern regime sought to impose its Stalinist-Maoist economic model on the South, resulting in a profound economic crisis from the late 1970s throughout the early 1990s. With the support of Communist Party chiefs of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), a group of former southern technocrats and corporate managers (now unemployed or having just been released from prisons) contributed signiﬁcant policy solutions based on liberal economic ideas. Their liberal ideas were instrumental in rescuing the country from the crisis, setting the stage for Vietnam’s subsequent growth. Their role set Vietnam’s course of economic reform on a distinct path from those in China or the Soviet bloc, while also speaking to the rise of liberal economic ideas in the global economic history. In the Vietnamese story, local actors played a central role while the West had much less inﬂuence than in the Soviet bloc. In comparative perspective, even though there were no intellectual debates on abstract economic ideas in Vietnam as in China, the contributions of liberal ideas in the politically hostile environment of Vietnam suggest their great resilience.

Session 1110: Constructing Socialism:
State-Building and Governance in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1954–1975
Sponsored By Vietnam Studies Group
Sunday, March 15, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 118

Organizer
Johnny Zhen
University of British Columbia

Chair
Christopher Goscha
Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

Discussant
Pierre Asselin
San Diego State University, United States

Paper Presenters
Uyen Nguyen (she/her/hers)
Harvard University, United States

Alec Holcombe
Ohio University, United States

Hai-Chung Pham (she/her/hers)
British University Vietnam, Vietnam

Johnny Zhen
University of British Columbia

Although the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was proclaimed in 1945, it was only after the 1954 Geneva Accords and the end of the First Indochina War that the regime consolidated control in the North and began constructing a socialist state. This panel explores how the DRV pursued socialism between 1954 and 1975 through economic, legal, ideological, and transnational eﬀorts. Collectively, the papers argue that socialist state-building in North Vietnam was not a uniform or top-down project but one shaped by local participation, institutional negotiation, and global exchange.

Nguyen examines early interactions between private economic actors and the DRV after 1954 and their impact on the regime’s approach to socialist economic planning. Holcombe reconstructs the DRV’s 1959 constitutional propaganda campaign, showing how leaders used Soviet-style participation to promote the new constitution and manage state–society relations. Pham demonstrates that state-controlled media functioned as a ﬂexible tool for shaping ideology and managing public sentiment, adapting to the demands of war and social change. Zhen analyzes how the DRV used cultural diplomacy with the PRC to advance socialist state-building through the
cross-border circulation of revolutionary literature and the creation of a shared socialist identity.

Bringing together economic, legal, media, and cultural perspectives, the panel reconsiders the making of socialism in North Vietnam as a dynamic and contested process. It contributes to broader discussions on socialist governance and the lived experience of socialist development.

1: Negotiating Boundaries: Merchants, Markets, and State Encounters in the Making of Socialist North Vietnam, 1954–1955
Uyen T. Nguyen (she/her/hers)
Harvard University, United States

Throughout the First Indochina War, despite their claim to be the legitimate ruler of the whole territory, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) state recognized that the DRV-occupied zones and the French-Associated State of Vietnam (ASV) zones were two separate economic systems and considered commercial exchanges with the French-ASV zone as foreign trade. This paper examines the ﬁrst encounters between the state and private economic actors in North Vietnam after these two economic zones were integrated at the end of the war in 1954. It focuses on state–private interactions in two speciﬁc episodes: the explosion of unregulated commercial exchanges between the two zones between July and December 1954, and the campaign of business registration that took place in Hanoi, Haiphong, and Nam Dinh in the latter half of 1955. The paper argues that, beyond ideological belief, these on-the-ground encounters were essential to forming the DRV state’s attitude and later strategies towards the economic Stalinization of North Vietnam throughout the late 1950s and until the late 1980s.

2: Socialist Legality: Propagandizing the DRV’s 1959 Constitution
Alec Holcombe
Ohio University, United States

Toward the end of 1956, Vietnam’s Communist Party leaders in Hanoi decided to produce a new constitution for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). This new constitution was to replace the DRV’s ﬁrst one, which had been ratiﬁed in 1946. To this end, North Vietnam’s leaders formed a twenty-nine-person “Committee to Amend the Constitution” [Ủy ban sửa đổi hiến pháp]. Chaired by Hồ Chí Minh with help from fellow Politburo members Hoàng Văn Hoan (Ambassador to China), Phạm Văn Đồng (Prime Minister), and Võ Nguyên Giáp (Minister of Defense), the Committee ﬁrst met in February of 1957 and, twenty-four meetings later, in March of 1959, completed a “draft constitution.” This article examines the Committee’s next task, which was to propagandize the new constitution to the North Vietnamese people following the basic steps developed by the Soviet Union during production of its 1936 “Stalin Constitution.” Thus, the DRV Committee publicized the draft constitution, organized local meetings throughout North Vietnam to discuss it, and then solicited feedback letters from regular people about the new document. Theoretically, the Committee was supposed to further revise the constitution in accordance with this popular feedback. This process was called the “people’s referendum” [trưng cầu dân ý] and was supposed to reﬂect the “truly democratic character” of the DRV regime. Using notes from the Committee’s meetings, constitution feedback letters saved by DRV archivists, and press coverage of the “people’s referendum,” I reconstruct the event and show how it reﬂects the challenges of state-society relations in the DRV.

3: Media, Ideology, and the Socialist State in North Vietnam,1954–1975
Hai-Chung Pham (she/her/hers)
British University Vietnam, Vietnam

This paper examines the instrumental role of state-controlled media in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) from 1954 to 1975 as a central mechanism of governance, ideological indoctrination, and mass mobilization. Far from serving as mere communication tools, outlets such as Nhân Dân, Báo Quân đội Nhân dân, visual propaganda, and radio broadcasts were embedded within a broader socialist state-building strategy grounded in Marxist-Leninist doctrine and Ho Chi Minh Thought.
Drawing on archival materials, policy directives, and interviews, this study analyzes how the DRV leadership fused Leninist media theory with local revolutionary conditions to construct narratives that framed war as both a patriotic and class-based struggle. Through the tripartite framework of Nhân vận (propaganda among the people), Binh vận (propaganda among military ranks), and Địch vận (propaganda in enemy-controlled areas), media content was meticulously tailored to sustain unity, inspire sacriﬁce, and discredit adversaries. The paper highlights how media evolved dynamically to address the shifting demands of war and socialist transformation—mobilizing peasants for land reform, urban populations for industrialization, and soldiers for “people’s war.” Literary ﬁgures like Tố Hữu and cultural programs reinforced ideological messaging, portraying the DRV as a morally uniﬁed society advancing toward national reuniﬁcation. By analyzing these media strategies within their historical and theoretical context, this paper demonstrates that propaganda in the DRV was not merely top-down persuasion but a complex, adaptive practice of emotional governance, social control, and revolutionary mobilization—central to the state’s consolidation and legitimacy.

4: Revolution Across Borders: Cultural Diplomacy and Socialist State-Building in Sino-Vietnamese Relations, 1955–1969
Johnny Zhen
University of British Columbia

This paper examines how the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) employed cultural diplomacy as a strategic tool for socialist state-building from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, focusing on the circulation and reception of Vietnamese revolutionary literature in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). While most studies of Sino-Vietnamese relations emphasize high-level diplomacy and wartime aid, this paper highlights everyday cultural exchange as central to the DRV’s transnational revolutionary project. After the 1954 Geneva Conference, the DRV and PRC signed the Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Cooperation Agreement (1955), which institutionalized extensive cooperation in the cultural, educational, and public health ﬁelds. Within this framework, cultural exchange functioned not merely as societal interchange but as an active and reciprocal practice for shaping revolutionary narratives and legitimizing socialist sovereignty. Vietnamese texts such as Sống như Anh (Live Like Him) were translated and widely staged in China during the so-called Resist America Aid Vietnam campaign, positioning the DRV’s revolution as a model of socialist virtue. The reception of these works in the PRC not only aﬃrmed the DRV’s sovereignty but also helped produce a shared socialist imaginary and contributed to a broader project of cross-border state-building. By tracing these cultural exchanges, the paper argues that DRV state-building was deeply transnational, moving beyond the notion of a purely national revolution and revealing how everyday ﬂows of propaganda and literature sustained state-building within the broader socialist world.

Session 1113: Decolonizing Cold War Histories in Mainland Southeast Asia
Sunday, March 15, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 121

2: From the Reciprocal Village Model to the Rational Peasant: Reorganization of Villages in the Mekong Delta by Wartime South Vietnam’s State
Hisashi Shimojo (he/him/his)
Kobe University, Japan

This presentation examines the transition from the reciprocal village model to the rational peasant in wartime South Vietnam, focusing on a rural, multiethnic village in the Mekong Delta. Ngo Dinh Diem, the ﬁrst president of South Vietnam, sought to impose an extremely ideological, uniform rural community model on the village societies in the southern Mekong Delta. Diem aimed for a third way away from both communism and American liberal capitalism. He especially targeted the rural areas of the Mekong Delta, where governing for land reclamation (dinh dien) was void. He attempted to establish a new subsistence insurance system — a kind of moral economy — and become a patron to the peasants who found Diem’s policies too disconnected from the realities of their villages. After the collapse of the Diem regime, a military ofﬁcer, Nguyen Van Thieu, came to power. With the American military and economic support, his regime implemented the “Green Revolution” and “Land to the Tiller” policies. These policies aimed to eliminate the landlord-tenant relationship and create modern peasants adapted to the market economy. From Diem to Thieu, rural governance shifted from securing territory by realizing the rural model villages to transforming peasants as rational economic men — i.e., homo economicus. This new strategy intended to create peasants who would pursue their own interests by providing short-term material beneﬁts and enabling them to become self-reliant individuals suitable for the market economy. It was the elites of the newly established nation-state who demanded that the people of the Mekong Delta become either members of village communities with reciprocal moral values or “rational peasants.”

Session 1217: Decolonization and Diplomacy in Cold War Southeast Asia
Sunday, March 15, 2026
10:45 AM – 12:15 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 204

1: Decolonization or Recolonization? Bandung and the Territorial Imperatives of Indonesia and the Two Vietnams, 1955-65
Christian C. Lentz (he/him/his)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States

This paper examines trilateral relations between Indonesia and the two Vietnams from 1955-65, when political elites negotiated between commitments to free themselves from colonial rule on the one hand and imperatives to ﬁll out territories deﬁned by colonial rule on the other. All three countries sent delegates to the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, embraced principles of non-alignment and self-determination, and pledged to its decolonizing agenda. Yet subsequent diplomatic, political, and military maneuvers demonstrate that Vietnamese and Indonesian elites used the same Bandung principles to legitimize the conquest of territory created by former colonial overlords. Putting the principle of “respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations” to work, Presidents Sukarno of Indonesia and Ho Chi Minh of northern Vietnam (DRV) made common cause in their respective pursuits of western New Guinea, left out of the 1949 settlement with the Netherlands, and southern Vietnam (RVN), administered separately since the 1954 Geneva Agreements. Caught in between, RVN leaders worried about the expansionist ambitions of both and, consequently, drew closer to the US in a heating Cold War contest. Taken together, their pursuit of territory suggests how Bandung principles exceeded anti-colonial solidarity and became, instead, tools of postcolonial recolonization.

Session 1226: State Power and Administration in China’s Southern Frontier
Sunday, March 15, 2026
10:45 AM – 12:15 PM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 213

1: Narrative Gaps on the Early Modern Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands: The Bầu Lords and Two Runs to the Mountains (16th-17th Centuries)
Thùy Lan Thị Thùy Đỗ (she/her/hers)
Vietnam National University, Vietnam

The history of Đại Việt in the early modern period is often discussed in terms of the North-South division, with the Southern and Northern Dynasties in the 16th century, followed by the split between Đàng Ngoài (Tonkin) and Đàng Trong (Cochinchina) in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Sino-Vietnamese borderlands also developed into two distinct zones that served as a buffer between the Lê-Trịnh and the Ming. The two were both supported by the Ming court in Beijing. Of these, the Mạc-controlled prefecture of Cao Bằng has received scholarly attention both within Vietnam and internationally. However, the Tuyên Quang prefecture under the Vũ family – known as the Lords Bầu – which existed in the 16th and 17th centuries, has been overlooked, particularly in English-language scholarship. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing a range of primary sources, including Vietnamese texts, European maps and travel accounts, archaeological findings, and field surveys conducted in northern Vietnam. I argue that the two phenomena – the Lords Bầu and the Mạc Dynasty in Cao Bằng – share similarities and together provide concrete examples that diverge from the concept of Zomia proposed by James C. Scott. Their retreats to the highlands were not attempts to escape state structures, but an effort to transplant the lowland model of governance into mountainous regions, with the goal of reasserting their power in the delta. The difference is that neither the Vũ nor the Mạc families succeeded, unlike the Lê Dynasty – a highland-origin clan that successfully moved to Thăng Long (Hanoi) twice, in the 15th and 16th centuries.

2: In the Aftermath of Border Regulation: Lê Vietnam’s Responses to Mining Disturbances in the China-Vietnam Borderlands in the 1770s
Joshua Herr
DePauw University, United States

In the 1740s, in response to a political crisis in Lê dynasty Vietnam, the Qing court developed a new system of border regulation at the China-Vietnam border. A key feature of this system was a passport system that permitted, tracked, and regulated the movement of Chinese merchants into Lê territory for trade. This system of passports and the legal movement of licensed individuals across the border lasted from its inception in 1744 until 1775, when the Lê and Qing courts agreed to curtail it due to a crisis of unruly miners in the Lê northern uplands near the border. This was a crisis for Lê governance and revenue, as the miners provoked violence and refused to submit taxes on their mining proceeds, and a crisis of diplomatic relations between the Qing and the Lê, as the miners were predominantly migrants from Qing China and, as it was discovered, undocumented and unregulated by the passport system. In this paper, I focus on the various responses of the Lê court to mining activities in the uplands in the context of Lê-Qing relations and Qing border regulation. I argue that, in addition to military intervention and negotiation with upland chieftains, the Lê court also deployed an assimilationist strategy that aimed to create cultural institutions in upland areas that would integrate the borderlands into the lowland Dai Viet polity. In support of my argument, I will examine several inscriptions from local sites in Lang Son in northern Vietnam dating from the 1770s.

tuannyriver

website & blog of Tuan Hoang, Pepperdine University

Vietnam studies at AAS 2026 in Vancouver, BC

THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2026

FRIDAY, MARCH 14, 2026

SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2026

SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 2026

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tuannyriver

website & blog of Tuan Hoang, Pepperdine University

Vietnam studies at AAS 2026 in Vancouver, BC

THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2026

FRIDAY, MARCH 14, 2026

SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2026

SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 2026

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