Helle Rydstrom

• Professor
• Lund University

This special issue explores the intertwining reconfigurations of labour and welfare in the Global South by bringing together eight empirical studies of different national and transnational contexts and three commentaries. It asks how Global South people and states alike have come to prioritize market logics as guiding principles for welfare systems...

Only rarely is Vietnam's global heavy industry studied from an anthropological perspective in either its gender or its class dimensions. This article contributes new insights into the ways in which the interagential dynamics of gender and technology from shopfloor to engineer offices coproduce social orders in contesting and perpetuating essentiali...

Recent political, legal, and social changes have served to highlight shifting understandings of sexualities in contemporary Vietnamese society. Such changes have included pride demonstrations; the establishment of organisations working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights; new legislation; and increased openness to non...

This chapter examines understandings of feminism in Vietnam by identifying scholarly currents that both resonate with and challenge global perspectives. Affinities with global scholarship are epitomized in the Vietnamese context by contestations over the long-standing sociopolitical goal of ‘Equality between Men and Women’. A shift has taken place,...

Special Issue: “Critical Explorations of Crisis: Politics, Precariousness, and Potentialities”. Special Issue Editors: Rydstrom, Helle, Mo Hamza, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, and Vanja Berggren. Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs, Volume 12, Issue 3-4, 2022. Table of Contents: -Gammeltoft-Hansen, Thomas, Helle Rydstro...

This article explores crisis as social dynamics spurred by events that not only disrupt the normal order of things, but also transmute into crisis processes that generate persisting hardship and problems of the ordinary. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the industrial zones of Northern Vietnam, the article highlights the ways in which...

In this presentation we focus on men’s violence against the female population both during and in the wake of climate disasters in the Philippines and Vietnam. We examine the legal framework which has been ratified in the two countries to protect individual’s right to live a life without being abused and; how various types of organizations work to p...

Recent political, legal and social shifts in relation to the rights and recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in Vietnam have facilitated increasing openness about the non-heteronormative preferences of young adults. However, established societal and familial norms related to the importance of heteronormative m...

In the world we live in today, the presence and claims of crisis abound – from climate change, financial and political crisis to depression, livelihoods and personal security crisis. There is a challenge to studying crisis due to the ways in which crisis as a notion, condition and experience refers to and operates at various societal levels. Furthe...

Although Vietnamese society is currently undergoing significant changes with regards to the rights and perceptions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) people, dominant socio-cultural norms related to gender, sexuality, and the importance of the patrilineal family regime continue to cast a shadow over the lives of GLBTQ in cont...

This article explores climate disasters in the era of the Anthropocene from a gender specific crisis perspective; as conditions of unpredictable outcomes and ruination which are encroaching differentiated ramifications upon inhabitants in coastal Vietnam. The article contests the ways in which the notions of vulnerability and resilience tend to und...

This article examines the ways in which women’s ‘family happiness’ in Vietnam paradoxically, and alarmingly, is rendered compatible with the endurance of what is diminished as ‘minor’ partner violence. Thus focusing on the gendering of ‘happiness’ and the discrepancies between ideals and practices, the article unfolds how intersections between a nu...

Proficiently oscillating between its role as a governmental mass organization and a grassroots movement, the Women’s Union in Vietnam emerges as a kaleidoscopic body with a dual representative role. Initiatives taken by the Union revolve around women and their lives as organized in the predominant family constellation in the country; the heterosexu...

Recent public debates about sexuality in India and Vietnam have brought the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people sharply into focus. Drawing on legal documents, secondary sources and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the urban centres of Delhi and Hanoi, this article shows how the efforts of civil society organisations dedicate...

The paper discusses two well-organized Nordic gender conferences—one in Bergen and one in Gothenburg—which, however, were remarkably different in character. While the local Norwegian conference opened windows to the world outside the Global North, the windows were kept only ajar at the national Swedish meeting.

By drawing on testimonies gathered in rural Vietnam, this article focuses on the violence to which local inhabitants were subjected when Vietnam was under French rule (1883-1954). On a self-imposed ‘civilizing mission’, the control of local bodies was critical for the colonial powers and they became the subject of brutal abuse. Violence was exercis...

Previous research on war rarely considers local gender configurations or the ways in which expectations about female and male roles relate to particular conflicts. Studies of war seem inclined to consider either the roles of women or the roles of men but less often the ways in which gender, as a relational sociocultural logic, permeates warfare. Fu...

By drawing on ethnographic data collected in two different settings in northern Vietnam, this article considers the ways in which heterosexual masculinity is configured by younger men. The intersection between heterosexuality and masculinity, the article argues, epitomizes a site of contestations between moral ideals, expectations about gendered su...

This article examines the ‘inclusive education’ strategy in Vietnam and the extent to which it facilitates learning in students with disabilities. After the introduction of the doi moi (renewal) policy in 1986, Vietnamese society went through a period of rapid transformation, including the educational sector. Debates on teaching means, curricula, l...

By employing an intergenerational perspective, this article examines the ways in which memories about the war between Vietnam and the USA are engraved in the social and individual body in a northern Vietnamese rural community. Throughout the 1990s, Vietnam and the USA attempted to improve their postwar relationship. The current atmosphere of coming...

This article examines men's use of physical punishment when interacting with their sons or grandsons in rural Vietnam. By drawing on two periods of anthropological fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese commune, the article analyses the ways in which violence is informed by, while also perpetually reinforcing, a masculine discourse. Vietnam has ratifie...

Vietnam's increased integration into the global market economy entails rapid and dynamic changes that foster new ways of acting, interacting and rendering the world meaningful. This article addresses the ways in which an ongoing process of transformation in contemporary Vietnam is epitomised by the ambivalence and ambiguity with which female sexual...

Gender-related studies on contemporary Vietnam are few in number, and most writing concentrates on socio-economic topics. This book's focus on the fundamental issues of gender roles is a significant contribution. Bruce M. Lockhart, National University of Singapore. Our knowledge of contemporary Vietnamese society is still limited, and studies of ge...

This article examines husband-to-wife violence within a rural Vietnamese community. In Vietnam, domestic violence is tied to a complex field of cultural forces that consists of a patrilineal tradition of ancestor worship, assumptions about females' versus males' character, Confucian virtues, and a history of war. Females are expected to encourage h...

One of the first anthropological studies based on extensive fieldwork in Vietnam in decades, Embodying Morality examines child-rearing in a rural Red River delta commune. It is a sophisticated and intriguing exploration of the ways in which a family system based on principles of male descent influences the moral upbringing and learning of girls and...

This article examines how local Vietnamese ideas about female and male bodies, the patrilineage, and morality intersect with one another and influence girls' and boys' different social positions. In the rural commune of Thinh Tri, the meaning of patrilineal ancestor worship is salient. It is perceived to be a person's moral obligation to provide ma...

This article examines the ways in which rural Vietnamese girls' and boys' moral 'socialization' is influenced by Vietnamese educational discourses, local ideas of the body, and embodiment. In Vietnam, children's learning of 'good morality' is related to the metaphor of 'children are like white pieces of paper', which indicates that children need mo...