Thursday, March 23 / 4PM
HOMER BABBIDGE Class of 1947 Room
“The Affective, Economic and Symbolic Value of Driving Motorcycles & Autos in Southeast Asia”
Guest Lecture by Ivan V. Small
FLYER
This talk examines emergent consumption patterns in Vietnam’s shifting transportation market and then considers them within broader design and marketing infrastructures. First exploring how motorcycles were used not only for consumptive purposes but also served as stores of economic and symbolic value – then tracing the shifts in manufacturing and international trade agreements that mandated tariff reductions are reorienting material and temporal relations to the market. In this transition period in which the meanings and valuations of the motorcycle are shifting, anticipations of automobiles are also paramount. The latter part of the talk moves on to market design to discuss how a transnational transportation industry is anticipating and engaging new consumers not only in Vietnam but throughout Asia more broadly via an exploration of affective notions of mobility, and in the process potentially framing an emerging Asian “cultural market” around and with them.
Ivan V. Small (PhD Anthropology, Cornell University) is assistant professor at Central Connecticut State University. Prior to joining CCSU in 2014 Dr. Small was a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine, and a field study director with the India China Institute at The New School. His work has been published in a variety of disciplinary and area studies journals and edited volumes, including Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, and Figures of Modernity in Southeast Asia. He has two books currently under review: Currencies of Imagination: Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnamese Remittance Economies, and a co-edited volume entitled Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion & Design.
Sponsored by the Asian/Asian American Studies Institute, this event is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact: Ms Fe Delos-Santos at fe.delos-santos@uconn.edu