Ann Marie Leshkowich -"Social Welfare, Ethical Citizenship, and Gendered Civil Society: A Historical Ethnography of Social Work in Southern Vietnam"

Abstract
The development of a market-oriented economy in Vietnam over the past 35 years has fueled economic growth, rising household incomes, and consumerism, but it has also exacerbated inequality. In response, during the 2010s, the Vietnamese government called for the rapid development of the field of social work. Although described as “new,” the social work profession in fact has a longer history in southern Vietnam. Drawing upon participant observation, interviews, and archival research, this paper explores how under different political economic regimes over the past eighty years, both the government and social workers—most of them women—have emphasized the scientific nature of the field of social work in order to distinguish it from charitable volunteering, even as social workers share volunteers’ ethical commitments to social welfare and civil society. The irony is that social workers’ professionalization and educated middle-class status have risked reproducing the class inequalities that they otherwise have sought to break down.

Bio
Ann Marie Leshkowich (Professor of Anthropology, College of the Holy Cross) researches gender, economic transformation, class, fashion, and social work in Vietnam. She is author of Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014; awarded Harry J. Benda Prize, 2016) and co-editor of Traders in Motion: Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace (Cornell University Press, 2018), Neoliberalism in Vietnam (positions: asia critique, 2012), and Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress (Berg, 2003). Her research has been published in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and Fashion Theory.