Anthropology Seminar Series:

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Migration, mobility, and middle-class aspirations among Vietnamese migrants in Moscow

Speaker: Lan Anh Hoang (University of Melbourne)

Abstract: Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has emerged as a destination of choice for hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural Vietnam. Post-Soviet Russia’s porous borders and a sizeable shadow economy provide low-skilled migrants with exceptional economic opportunities which would not be possible elsewhere. The vast majority of Vietnamese migrants in Russia earn their living from market trade, which is fraught with risks but also promises life-changing wealth. Those who manage to get ahead in Russia find themselves in a tricky situation where the low status accorded to market trade in Vietnamese society stands at odds with their new-found wealth. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at Moscow’s markets from 2013 to 2016, I discuss how Vietnamese migrants’ subjectivities, social self-positioning, and mobility aspirations are configured by their place-based experiences within Russia’s migration regime. The enormous emotional and financial sacrifices that migrants make to secure an upgrade to the middle-class status for their children in the homeland reveal not only their sense of vulnerability and marginalisation in Russia but also the socialist values embedded in their conception of middleclassness. The case of Vietnamese in Moscow highlights the situatedness of aspirations and demonstrates that diaspora is not just a group of people but essentially a category of practice.

Speaker bio: Lan Anh Hoang is Associate Professor in Development Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Vietnamese migrants in Russia: mobility in times of uncertainty (Amsterdam University Press 2020) and a co-editor of Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances, and the Changing Family in Asia (2015) and Money and Moralities in Contemporary Asia (2019). Her research has been published in many prestigious journals such as Gender and Society, Gender, Place and Culture, Global Networks, Population, Space and Place, Geoforum, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Asian Studies Review, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Lan’s current project examines brokerage and migrant networks in the Vietnam-Australia migration corridor.

Host: Robbie Peters

Please join via Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84573121784