On Tuesday, 16 June, at 17:00 (Tbilisi time), the Anthropology Seminar Series presents a book talk “Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi“ by Christina Schwenkel.
Abstract:
Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi argues for greater attention to the sensory dimensions of urban crises, particularly as experienced through sonic rupture. When COVID-19 reached Vietnam in early 2020, the government’s response could be heard. Loudspeakers mounted on street corners broadcast directives; frontline workers listened diagnostically for symptoms; residents learned to attune to acoustic signals of risk and care. This book talk discusses how Vietnam’s pandemic response drew on deep histories of “disaster socialism,” asking what collective mobilization through crisis sounded like from the inside. Sounding and listening were not incidental to pandemic governance but central to it, shaping how the state, healthcare workers, and urban residents navigated a public health emergency. Social cohesion and sonic dissent coexisted within the same infrastructures of sound, revealing what vision-centered accounts of disasters often overlook.
Bio:
Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, USA. She is author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Indiana UP, 2009) and the award-winning Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke UP, 2020), which together examine how people remember, repair, and rebuild from the wreckage of infrastructural warfare. Her latest book, a sensory autoethnography entitled Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, extends her work on urban disaster and decay to explore media infrastructures and the anthropology of sound. https://christinaschwenkel.com
Working language: English
Format: online — for details contact mariam.darchiashvili@