Hot Science, High Water: Assembling Nature, Society and Environmental Policy in Contemporary Vietnam

by Eren Zink

Hot Science, High Water explores the work of different generations of Vietnamese scientists as they engage with local and international efforts to conserve nature, address climate change, and carry out scientific research. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in universities, government offices, and foreign embassies, as well as the muddy intertidal zones of coastal Vietnam, the study reveals scientists engaged in a politics of nature that is local and global, contemporary and historical, and natural and social. More generally, this book is an ethnography of science in a developing country grappling with the local implications of global networks of knowledge production, and shifting trends in international development policy.

"Hot Science challenges dichotomies such as local/ global, Vietnamese/foreign, and science/politics by showing that such dichotomies more aptly describe the framing of these projects than the targets of their interventions. In this way, the book offers a corrective to commonly held conceptions of how science and development currently intertwine in non-Western countries that receive foreign aid." - Michitake Aso, East Asian Science Technology and Society, 9:3

Eren Zink is Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Publication year: 2013
290 pp / 229mm x 152mm
20 figures, 1 map
ISBN: 978-87-7694-128-4, Paperback
ISBN: 978-87-7694-127-7, Hardback

NIAS Press