Dissertation
My dissertation research focuses on the regulation of traditional marketplaces, institutions which are understudied academically but common fixtures of everyday life. I use theories of social constructionism to study how public health problems are made: how they become conceptualized, perceived, and supported by certain kinds of evidence to motivate certain kinds of state-centered policy interventions. “Marketplaces” have political lives, but until only a few years ago did international organizations and governments come to care about them seriously in the context of health. Specifically, powerful players care about these sites because of the suspected risk they pose to population health in the West. This knowledge movement centered on hegemonic scientific ideas at the international level which are concerned with disease surveillance at places known as “traditional markets” or sometimes called “wet markets.”
From political science, there has not been too much theorizing about these marketplaces, either. The work that has been done has mostly centered on the benefits of the collective space that markets can provide for civil society (Holland 2017; Grossman 2021; Hummel 2022). We know very little about how market regulation works in authoritarian regimes and in Asia (Sekhani, Mohan, and Medipally 2022). However, international organizations identify Southeast Asia as a major “hotspot” for future zoonoses, making it critical to get it right if we do wish to improve health and hope to prevent zoonotic disease spillover.
My research relies on multi-level qualitative methods to unpack the various concepts, narratives, and types of governance I observe. I have conducted 40 interviews with a range of actors: including experts at international organizations in addition to food safety researchers, market managers, officials, and traders in Vietnam. I triangulate interview findings with marketplace observations, media, and both present-day and historical government documents. In addition, I use a comparative historical approach to identify key regime aspects in analyzing marketplace governance across various regimes within Vietnam. I draw from primary archival state documents, and secondary historical and literary sources in Vietnamese, French, and English gathered in archives and libraries in Vietnam, Cambodia, and France.
I find that international organizations and the Vietnamese government differ fundamentally in the way they perceive governance which has wide-reaching implications for how we think about health governance beyond the context of Vietnam. While international organizations consider marketplaces as places, the Vietnamese government regulates on traders as people. I detail how and why place-based governance and people-based governance matters for global health governance and biosecurity interventions. I am preparing my dissertation for book publication to be submitted to an academic press.
Research Agenda
My research adds to the study of governance and authoritarianism by contributing further work on social policy development beyond existing models of distributive goods and clientelism. It is concerned with lived experiences of governance and social policy, especially in food, health, and environment. In research I prepared for a chapter on the Vietnamese government’s response to COVID-19 in Coronavirus Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2021), I detail how the swift, cost-effective, and to the eyes of the foreign press, shockingly successful emergency preparedness fundamentally was a result of extensive Party-state coordination and reach into society. The Vietnamese Communist Party demonstrated its strong state capacity during the pandemic, which makes it even more puzzling why the government is not as successful in other examples of health regulation. Going forward, I plan to put this work in comparison to better study the role of civil society and scientific actors in advocating for public policy in various countries.
My research agenda furthermore examines social policy formation in East and Southeast Asia, as well as comparative research on One Health policies and capacity across the United States. I am also examining historical cases on laws directed towards petty traders (sometimes called “hawkers”) and food retailers to more closely study the dynamics of labor formalization. I am currently working on these projects with plans to submit to policy journals such as World Development, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Journal of East Asian Studies in 2027.