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 50 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 government documents. In addition, I use comparative historical analysis to identify key regime aspects in analyzing marketplace governance across various regimes within Vietnam (pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial North/South). I draw from primary archival state documents, secondary historical and literary sources in Vietnamese, French, and English.
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. 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 will be 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 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 successful in other cases of 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.
The second strand of my research is concerned with the intersections of biosecurity and criminality. Securitizing and measuring potential biological threats to population health are increasingly important political considerations to national governments and international actors. There has been much speculation on the role “wet markets” play in facilitating spillover of zoonotic disease from live animals to human populations. These topics are particularly salient in Southeast Asia, and are problems often framed by global actors as cultural outcomes rather than political.
The third focus of my research agenda is the role of political and economic factors shaping health and development outcomes. Here, I consider the effects of how small-scale traders and retailers are perceived by states and development organizations and framed as threats to notions of regime stability, modernity, public health, and food safety. This research has significant implications for how we understand paths to sustainable development.