Organizer: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Type/Location: Hybrid / Madison, WI

Description:

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison for a talk by Christina Schwenkel, Professor of Anthropology at UC Riverside. Looking back on the early months of the pandemic in Vietnam, the talk argues for greater attention to the sensory dimensions of public health security, particularly as experienced through sonic rupture.

Abstract:

During the early months of the pandemic, public health responses in Vietnam relied on diverse listening practices. From the amplified reach of loudspeakers to the diagnostic work of frontline workers, these practices of “medical listening” revealed how auditory attention shaped governance during a global health emergency, connecting state entities, healthcare workers, and urban residents in efforts to manage crisis and care. This talk argues for greater attention to the sensory dimensions of public health security, particularly as experienced through sonic rupture. Catastrophic events like pandemics disrupt everyday life and radically reorient the senses, compelling new ways of attuning to urban environments through sound. In an era dominated by vision, what can the sounds associated with public health emergencies reveal about governance and experiences of vulnerability? And how might listening to acoustic atmospheres—shaped by histories of war and revolution—offer new insights into states of exception and their implications for collective life? Drawing on embodied soundwork conducted in Hanoi during the first year of COVID-19, this talk examines how people navigated risk and uncertainty through auditory infrastructures that fostered both social cohesion and sonic dissent.

About the Speaker:

Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and a former Fulbright Fellow at the University of Sciences and Humanities in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam. From 2018 to 2022, she served as Co-editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and she currently serves on the Editorial Committee of University of California Press and the AAS Publications Editorial Board. Her research examines the material legacies of infrastructural warfare in urban Vietnam and the Cold War circulations of people, objects, and design technologies among socialist-allied countries that unfolded in its wake. She is the 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 explore the material practices through which people remember and rebuild cities after human-made catastrophe. Her most recent book, a sensory autoethnography entitled Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi (UC Press, 2025), extends her work on urban disaster and decay to encompass media infrastructures and the anthropology of sound.

Registration:

To attend the event in person, please register here.

To attend the event virtually, please join the zoom meeting here.