Hanoi, Vietnam
Sarah Turner will build on her expertise in Vietnam's capital city Hanoi, to examine the impacts of new infrastructure projects that are being strongly endorsed and supported by the socialist state as it attempts to create a sustainable mega city or "second Singapore". She will focus on migrant street vendors to explore how members of this group are finding ways to maintain their livelihoods despite vending bans on certain roads and transportation policies that will directly limit their mobility. Preliminary fieldwork with this group suggests that individuals use everyday strategies of avoidance and covert resistance to continue to work, but little is known about how wireless devices might play into these approaches, such as social media to warn each other of police road blocks or vending raids. Turner will thus focus on how this marginalized community carves out possible, flexible livelihoods within these socio technical systems.
Selected Publications
Turner, S. (2024). Disposable People as Infrastructure? The Livelihood Trials and Tactics of Three-Wheeler Delivery Drivers on Hanoi’s Streets, Vietnam, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2024.2320926
Turner, S. (2021). Slow forms of infrastructural violence: The case of Vietnam’s mountainous northern borderlands. Geoforum, 133, 185-197.
Turner, S., C. Zuberec, and H.T.T. Pham (2021). Visualizing frictional encounters: Analyzing and representing street vendor strategies in Vietnam through narrative mapping. Applied Geography, 131.
Turner, S. and H. Ngo (2018). Contesting socialist state visions for modern mobilities: informal motorbike taxi drivers’ struggles and strategies on Hanoi’s streets, Vietnam. International Development and Planning Review 41(1):43-61.
Eidse, N., S. Turner, and N. Oswin (2016). Contesting Street Spaces in a Socialist City: Itinerant Vending-Scapes and the Everyday Politics of Mobility in Hanoi, Vietnam. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 106 (2) 340–349.
Eidse, N. and S. Turner (2014). Doing resistance their own way: counter narratives of street vending in Hanoi, Vietnam through solicited journaling. Area 46 (3), 242-248.
Turner, S. and L. Schoenberger (2012). Street vendor livelihoods and everyday politics in Hanoi, Vietnam: the seeds of a diverse economy? Urban Studies 49(5), 1027-1044.