In this project, I will focus on the impacts of mining in the Northwest uplands of Vietnam as part of a broader study of how development discourse and resource politics have shaped and reshaped this borderland over the past three decades.

Month: Aug   Year: 2020

Month: Jul   Year: 2022

The Living Delta Hub focuses on 3 major deltas in Asia: The Red River, The Mekong & the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna. We aim to safeguard delta futures through more resilient communities and sustainable development and to address the significant challenges currently confronting these delta SESs in a transdisciplinary manner that responds to the interlinked agenda of the SDGs.

Month: Jan   Year: 2019

Month: Dec   Year: 2024

Since the 1980s, Southeast Asia's Mekong Region has seen a radical transformation from "battlefields to marketplaces" that heralded regional development and economic benefits. Yet, for many who rely on the transboundary Mekong, a river that supports an estimated 300 million people, the region's transformation meant not only a loss of biodiversity but also the gradual decimation and displacement of a way of life and making a living over generations. In other words, the impacts and benefits of this transformation are not evenly distributed, and for some, mean persistent but silent, generational, and cumulative experiences of marginalisation and impoverishment. In this project, we propose examining these processes and uneven impacts as a type of "slow violence" that emphasises time and generation in analysis. Slow violence refers to "a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is not typically viewed as violence at all" (Nixon 2011, 2). Our study aims to unravel the workings of slow violence, a violence that is often overlooked, through research and analysis on the persistent but difficult-to-detect impacts of development-induced displacement and accumulation of environmental impacts on Mekong communities that span generations. We propose doing so by developing a novel framework that brings together slow violence with feminist political ecology as a way to understand the heterogeneous and multifaceted impacts of development and violence across space and time. This is important in the context of development along the Mekong River because more typically, inability to benefit from economic development is considered in relation to discrete projects or governments, rather than in relation to enduring legacies of violence, colonialism, and displacement that span generations and that are disproportionately born by marginalised groups. Such an oversight also means conceptually and practically that the negative impacts are more easily overshadowed by real or perceived economic gains. Thus, we aim to provide new insights into the uneven impacts, responses and struggles across time and space, and to do so we will work with co-researchers who bear the brunt of these impacts.

Month: Jul   Year: 2003

Month: Jun   Year: 2026