Between 2021-22, we successfully conducted fieldwork despite pandemic restrictions. The high quality of the data led to important analyses published by reputable journals and presses. By the end of the project, the two PhD researchers had defended their dissertations, both having been awarded with the highest grade in the German academic system – Dr Ngoc Luong also won two prestigious graduate paper prizes. Dr Jake Lin became assistant professor at the University of Texas and Dr Jingyu Mao became lecturer at the University of Edinburgh; both researchers remained associates of the project.
The project’s kick-off workshop, The Good Life in Late Socialist Asia took place in 2019. In December 2021, we organised the mid-term conference, Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in Emerging Economies of the Global South, and in April 2024 the final conference The Politics of Care under Market Socialism. All these events were co-financed by Bielefeld Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF). Apart from co-organised workshops with partner institutions, we also organised mutiple panels at the conferences of American Anthropological Association, European Association of Southeast Asian Studies, European Association of Social Anthropologists, German Sociological Congress, and Association of Social Anthropology. Our well-received lecture series New Frontiers of Research on Welfare in the Global South featured well-known scholars. In 2024, the PI carried out a visiting professorship at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and was awarded NUS’s Isaac Manasseh Meyer Visiting Fellowship. During the fellowship, she co-organised the writing workshop Care, Welfare and Government in Marketizing Asia.
By the end of the project, we have completed five special issues and two books:
1. Rural Life in Late Socialism (European Journal of East Asian Studies;
2. Same title above as edited volume with Brill;
3. The Good Life in Late Socialism (2024, positions: asia critique);
4. Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in the Global South (2024, Global Social Policy);
5. Welfare in Crisis (2024, Journal of Labor and Society).
6. The Countryside in a Globalizing World (Journal of Political Sociology.)
7. Reconfiguring Vietnam: Global Encounters, Translocal Lifeworlds (in press by Yale South East Asian Monographs).
We also published peer-reviewed articles in high-ranked and highly regarded journals such as Focaal: Journal of Historical and Global Anthropology; Development and Change, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory; Global Social Policy; Global Public Policy; Economic Anthropology; Global Political Economy; Emotions and Society; Journal of Contemporary Asia, and others. For the broader public, we published a well-received Policy Brief Series featuring topics such as taxation, household registration systems, and labour laws.
