Dr Ashley Carruthers

Lecturer and ARC Post-Doctoral Fellow in Anthropology

Email: ashley.carruthers@anu.edu.au
Phone: + 61 2 6125 6788

Research Interests

My research to date has focused on the experiences and identities of members of the Vietnamese diaspora. I carried out my Ph.D. research in Western Sydney and Saigon, looking at how overseas Vietnamese people's relationships with Vietnam were changing from an exilic to a more transnational framework in the post-reform, post Cold War era. My research methodology was a multi-sited one, which meant looking at the experiences of overseas Vietnamese returnees in Vietnam, as well as at the contexts in which diasporic Vietnamese identity is formed in Western Sydney. I also followed kinship links and cultural flows across the borders of Vietnam and the diaspora. This work will soon appear in book form under the tentative title Beyond Diaspora: The Extensions of Vietnamese Social Space.

On graduation, I won a postdoctoral fellowship in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. I used this opportunity to do some research on Vietnamese migration and culture in the region, resulting in publications on the different ways Indochinese food and consumer goods are commodified and exoticised in Japan and Singapore. I also carried out research with Vietnamese unofficial bar and sex workers in Singapore, a group whose presence is I believe is representative of the next wave of feminised, Asia-bound emigration from Vietnam (this research will appear in my forthcoming book).

In 2005 I won an ARC fellowship to undertake a project entitled Intercommunal and Translocal Space in Fairfield: Tracking Indochinese Australian Lives. This project is a three year study of Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodian communities in the Fairfield Local Government Area (LGA) of Sydney. In this research, I will mainly be interested in the thesis that there exists a 'grassroots cosmopolitanism'; among these and other communities in Western Sydney that is premised on everyday crossings of minority-minority cultural borders, and specific sets of local-global relationships.

Future research interests include work on new waves of migration from Vietnam to East Asia, including the movement of women from the Mekong Delta to Taiwan as brides.

Recent and Main Publications

Forthcoming 'Unwilling Transnational Subjects: Vietnamese Satellite Television and Its Reception in the Diaspora', Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture.

Forthcoming 'Saigon from the Diaspora', Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Special Issue on Cinematic Representation of the Tropical/Urban City.

Forthcoming 'Vietnamese Language and Media Policy in the Service of Deterritorialised Nation-Building'. In Lee Hock Guan and Leo Suyardinata (Eds) Language, Nation and Development in Southeast Asia. Singapore: ISEAS.

Forthcoming 'Indochine Chic: Consuming the Indochinese Exotic in Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney'. In Lisa Law and Daisy Ng (eds) Foodscapes: The Cultural Politics of Food in Asia.

2004 'Cute Logics of the Multicultural and the Consumption of the Vietnamese Exotic in Japan'. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 12(2): 401-429. (View as html)

2002 'The Accumulation of National Belonging in Transnational Fields: Ways of Being at Home in Vietnam'. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 9(4): 423-444.

2001 'National Identity, Diasporic Anxiety and Music Video Culture in Vietnam'. In Yao Souchou (ed) House of Glass: Culture and the State in Southeast Asia, Singapore: ISEAS: 119-149.

1998 'Kung Fu Fighting: The Cultural Pedagogy of the Body in the Vovinam Overseas Vietnamese Martial Arts School', The Australian Journal of Anthropology (Special Issue 9: Diaspora, Identity, Cultural Politics), 9(1), 1998, pp. 45-57.

Courses Currently Taught

Honours and MA Thesis writing group
SRES2017 Vietnam Field School: Contemporary Change in Southeast Asia
ANTH1003 Global and Local
ANTH2129/ANTH6515 - Crossing Borders: Diasporas and Transnationalism