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.

Highlights

• Offers unique insight into the economy and politics of science, higher education and international development in Vietnam.
• Challenges the notion that science in a developing country is different from, and subordinate to, science in the developed West.
• Reveals the social, cultural and scientific practices that, together with natural processes, produce the facts of climate change in Vietnam. 

About the Author

 Eren Zink is Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Since 2000 he has actively researched, written on, and worked with scientists from developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.