Dr Marina Marouda

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Biography

Dr Marina Marouda is a research fellow at the department of Anthropology. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. Her ESRC-funded doctoral research was concerned with death rituals, kinship and politics in contemporary Viet Nam, and received an award from the Royal Anthropological institute (Sutasoma award).

Marina has carried out extensive fieldwork in Vietnam over several years. Her original research deals with the ways in which the dead are made to be intimately connected to the living, particularly in ritual settings, and the manner in which such connections are inflected by the national and communist revolutions, as well as by the country’s recent transition to market-socialism.

Before coming to Sussex she held postdoctoral fellowships at SOAS, University of London (ESRC fellowship), and at IIAS (International Institute for Asian Studies), Leiden. More recently, she was involved in an ERC-funded collaborative project entitled ‘Bionetworking in Asia’, in which she conducted research on stem-cell applications, science-based entrepreneurship and market-making processes in Viet Nam.

Research interests: social study of markets and entrepreneurship; science entrepreneurship; kinship and sociality; religion and ritual; social transformation; past and present; ethnography of the state; Viet Nam; South East Asia; Vietnamese diasporas

Selected Publications:

2019. 'The sociality of death: life potentialities and the Vietnamese dead. In: Panagiotopoulos, Anastasios and Espírito Santo, Diana (eds.) Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead, pp.141-164. Berghahn. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/PanagiotopoulosArticulate

2018. Clinical trials and venture tribulations: stem cell research and the making of Vietnamese bio-entrepreneurs. Critique of Anthropology Vol 38, Issue 1, pp. 96 - 114. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X17745142

2017. 'The neglected side of philanthropy: gifts to hungry ghosts in contemporary Việt Nam'. South East Asia Research 25 (3): 251-267. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967828X17709548

2017. with William Clayton, Juliet Jain and Adele Ladkin. The ‘digital glimpse’ as imagining home. Mobilities. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017.1365473

2016. with Sleeboom-Faulkner, M., Chekar, CK., Faulkner, A., Heitmeyer, C., Rosemann, A., Chaisinthop, N., Chang, HC, Ely, A., Kato, M., Patra, PK., Su, YY., Sui, SS., Suzuki, W., and Zhang, XQ. 'Comparing National Home-Keeping and the Regulation of Translational Stem Cell Applications: An International Perspective'. Social Science & Medicine. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.01.047 

2016. with Adele Ladkin, Cheryl Willis, Juliet Jain and William Clayton. Business travellers' connections to home: ICTs supporting work-life balance. New Technology, Work and Employment 31(3):255-270. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12071/full

2014. ‘Potent rituals and the royal dead: historical transformations in Vietnamese ritual practice’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, volume 45, issue 03, pp. 338-362. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463414000320

2013. ‘The unending death of an immortal: the state commemoration of Hồ Chí Minh in contemporary Việt Nam’. South East Asia Research 22 (1), pp 303-321. https://doi.org/10.5367/sear.2013.0148

Role

In August 2016, I joined a team of scholars working on an ERC-funded project entitled “Yiwu: Trust, Global Traders and Commodities in a Chinese International City” (TRODITIES). The project involves a consortium of four universities namely Sussex, Cambridge, Copenhagen and Royal Holloway London. Research is concerned with transnational trading activities involving Chinese-made commodities, and how such activities facilitate flows of goods as well as ideas, knowledge and people. As part of this project I am looking into the entrepreneurial activities of overseas Vietnamese, especially in places like China and Eastern Europe, and asses the significance of such activities for the making of transnational marketplaces and the facilitation of transcultural flows.

For more see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/global/research/researchprojects/yiwu