CHRISTINA SCHWENKEL

 Books

2020   Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

    *Awarded the 2021 European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) Social Science Book Prize

* Honorable mention, 2022 Spiro Kostof Book Award, Society for Architectural Historians

*Awarded the 2022 E. Ohnuki-Tierney Book Award for Historical Anthropology, American Anthropological Association

2009   The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Edited Collections

2021 Senses. Special issue of Roadsides, Collection 006.

2021 Global Vietnamese Studies. Co-edited with Charles Keith. Special issue of Journal of Vietnamese Studies 16(1).

2017    Vietnamese in Central Europe: An Unintended Diaspora. Special issue of Journal of Vietnamese Studies 12(1).

2012    Neoliberalism in Vietnam. Co-edited with Ann Marie Leshkowich. Special issue of positions: asia critique 20(2).

Articles

2022    “The Things They Carried (and Kept): Revisiting ‘Ostalgie’ in the Global South.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 64(2): 478–509.

2022 “What is Critical—and Anthropological—about Critical Urban Anthropology?” City & Society 34(1): 47-50.

2022    “Development through Dispossession: Coffee as Mutual Aid between Vietnam and East Germany.” Cold War History: 1-19.

2022    “Social Housing and Feminist Commoning in Urban Vietnam.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 94: 20-37.

2021 “Sensing Infrastructure.” Roadsides 006: 1-7.

2021    “Building Socialism: A Conversation,” with Alessandro Rippa. Roadsides 005: 76-81.

2021  “Global Vietnamese Studies,” with Charles Keith. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 16(1): 1-3. 

2020    “The Affective Turn in Ethnographies of Buddhism: Editors’ Note,” with Charles Keith. Journal of Vietnamese Studies15(4): 1-3. 

2019    “Socialist Modernism: An Architectural Photo Essay of Everyday Spaces in Hà Nội,” with François Carlet-Soulages and Sarah Grant. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 14(4): 64-80.

2018    “Urban Planning and Religious Reassemblage in Socialist Vietnam.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 86(2): 526-553. 

2017    “Of Memory and Materiality in the Study of Vietnam.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 12(3): 23-31.

2017   “Haunted Infrastructure: Religious Ruins and Urban Obstruction in Vietnam.” City & Society 29(3): 413-434.

2017    “Vietnamese in Central Europe: An Unintended Diaspora.” Introduction to special issue. Journal of Vietnamese Studies12(1): 1-9. 

2016    “Ruination and Reconstruction: East German Utopian Planning in Postwar Vietnam.” Berlin Journal 30: 30-33.  

2016    “Den globalen Sozialismus aufbauen: Eine städtebauliche Geschichte der DDR-Planung in Vinh, Vietnam.” Arch+: Zeitschrift für Architektur und Urbanismus. Special issue on architecture in Vietnam. Vol. 226: 30-41. 

2015    “Spectacular Infrastructure and its Breakdown in Socialist Vietnam.” American Ethnologist 42(3): 520-534.

2015    “The Other Veterans: Socialist Humanitarians Return to Vietnam.” Special issue on Traveling War Memory. History and Memory 27(2): 20-44. 

2015    “Reclaiming Rights to the Socialist City: Bureaucratic Artefacts and the Affective Appeal of Petitions.” South East Asia Research 23(2): 205-225. 

2015    “Socialist Mobilities: Crossing New Terrains in Vietnamese Migration Histories.” Special issue on the Global Vietnamese Diaspora. Central and Eastern European Migration Review 4(1): 13-25.

2015    “Socialist Palimpsests in Urban Vietnam.” Special issue on Socialist Networks and the Internationalization of Building Culture after 1945. ABE Journal: Architecture Beyond Europe 6 (2014): 1-19. 

2014    “Traveling Architecture: East German Urban Designs Abroad.” Special issue on Modernity, Socialism and Culture. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 2(2): 155-174.

2014    “Rethinking Asian Mobilities: Socialist Migration and Postsocialist Repatriation of Vietnamese Contract Workers in East Germany.” Critical Asian Studies 46(2): 235-258.

2013    “Post/Socialist Affect: Ruination and Reconstruction of the Nation in Urban Vietnam.” Cultural Anthropology 28(2): 252-277. 

2012    “Civilizing the City: Socialist Ruins and Urban Renewal in Central Vietnam.” positions: asia critique 20(2): 437-470.

2012    “How is Neoliberalism Good to Think Vietnam? How Is Vietnam Good to Think Neoliberalism?” Guest Editors’ Introduction with Ann Marie Leshkowich. positions: asia critique 20(2): 379-401.

2012    “Nhiếp ảnh Việt Nam và nghệ thuật thể hiện chiến tranh.” Phạm Phương Chi, trans. Văn hóa Nghệ An, Vol. 221. 

2010    “Concluding Thoughts on Politics of Memory in Asia.” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 34(2): 77-83. 

2009    “From John McCain to Abu Ghraib: Tortured Bodies and Historical Unaccountability of U.S. Empire in Vietnam.” American Anthropologist 111(1): 30-42. 

2008    “Exhibiting War, Reconciling Pasts: Journalistic Modes of Representation and Transnational Commemoration in Contemporary Vietnam.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3(1): 36-77. 

2006 “Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam.” Cultural Anthropology 21(1): 3-30.

Book Chapters

2024    “Concretizing Modernity: The Gendered Labor of Cement Infrastructures in Vietnam.” In Gendered Infrastructures: Space, Scale, and Identity. Yaffa Truelove and Anu Sabhlok, eds. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. Pp. 25-48.

2022    “Den globalen Sozialismus aufbauen: Eine städtebauliche Geschichte der DDR-Architektur in der Stadt Vinh, Vietnam.” In Architekturexport DDR: Zwischen Sansibar und Halensee. Andreas Butter and Thomas Flierl, eds. Berlin: Lukas Verlag. Pp. 76-92.

2023    “The Afterlife of Architectural Aid to Vietnam: A View from the Global South.” In Between Solidarity and Economic Constraints: Global Entanglements of Socialist Architecture and Planning in the Cold War Period. C. Bernhardt, A. Butter, and M. Motylinska, eds. Berlin: De Gruyter Press. Pp. 267-287.

2020    “From Socialist Moderns to the New Urban Poor: Gender and the Housing Question in Vinh City, Vietnam.” In Socialist and Post-Socialist Urbanisms: Critical Reflections from a Global Perspective. Lisa B. Welch Drummond and Douglas Young, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 27-49. 

2020 “From Socialist Assistance to National Self-Interest: Vietnamese Labor Migration into CMEA Countries.” Co-authored with Alena K. Alamgir. In Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World. J. Mark, A. M. Kalinovsky, and S. Marung, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pp. 100-124.

2019    “Governing through Garbage: Waste Infrastructure Breakdown and Gendered Apathy in Vietnam.” In Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and the City: Engaging the Urban and the Future. Setha Low, ed. New York: Routledge. Pp. 318-331. 

2019    “Shrinking Green Cities: Trees and the Afterlife of Eco-Socialist Planning in Vietnam.” In Ecologies of Socialisms: Germany, Nature, and the Left in History. Sabine Mödersheim, Scott Moranda, and Eli Rubin, eds. New York: Peter Lang. Pp. 251-274.

2018    “The Current Never Stops: Intimacies of Energy Infrastructure in Vietnam.” In The Promise of Infrastructure. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, Hannah Appel, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pp. 102-129.

2018    “Engineering Socialist Futures: On the Technological Worlding of Vinh City, Vietnam.” In Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present. Tim Bunnell and Daniel P.S. Goh, eds. Berlin: Jovis. Pp. 31-42. 

2018    “War Tourism and Geographies of Memory in Vietnam.” In Monumental Conflicts: Twentieth-Century Wars and the Evolution of Popular Memory. Derek R. Mallett, ed. New York: Routledge. Pp. 130-145. 

2017    “Eco-Socialism and Green City Making in Postwar Vietnam.” In Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism. Anne M. Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan, eds. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Pp. 45-66.

2015    “Affective Solidarities and East German Reconstruction of Vietnam.” In Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. Quinn Slobodian, ed. NY: Berghahn Books. Pp. 267-292.

2014    “Imaging Humanity: Socialist Film and Transnational Memories of the War in Vietnam.” In Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, eds. Berlin: De Gruyter Press. Pp 219-244. 

2014    “Architecture and Dwelling in the ‘War of Destruction’ in Vietnam.” In Architecture and Armed Conflict: The Politics of Destruction. JoAnne Mancini and Keith Bresnahan, eds. New York: Routledge. Pp. 11-26. 

2013    “War Debris in Postwar Society: Managing Risk and Uncertainty in the Former DMZ.” In Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe, eds. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Pp. 135-156.

2013    “The Ambivalence of Reconciliation in Contemporary Vietnamese Memoryscapes.” In Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War. Scott Laderman and Edwin Martini, eds. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Pp. 103-131. 

2013    “Soviet-Trained Scientist.” In Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity. Joshua Barker, Erik Harms, and Johan Lindquist, eds. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Pp. 59-61.

2011    “Youth Culture and Fading Memories of War in Hanoi, Vietnam.” In Everyday Life in Southeast Asia. Kathleen M. Adams and Kathleen Gillogly, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pp. 127-136.

2010    “Chuyển dịch trong thế giới Xã hội Chủ nghĩa: Xuất khẩu lao động và những trao đổi xuyên quốc gia giữa Việt Nam và Đông Đức cũ.” In Hiện Đại và Động Thái của Truyền Thống ở Việt Nam, Lương Văn Hy, ed. National University of Ho Chi Minh City Press. Pg. 427-438. 

2009    “‘The Camera Was My Weapon’: News Production and Representation of War in Vietnam.” In The Anthropology of News and Journalism: Global Perspectives. S. Elizabeth Bird, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pp. 86-99.