Food anxiety in globalising Vietnam

Abstract

This book would not have been possible without the generous support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Its funding of our research project ‘A Body-Political Approach to the Study of Food – Vietnam and the Global Transformations’ (P 27438) marked the beginning of insightful research on Food Anxieties in Vietnam – a hot and yet underexplored social phenomenon – and inspired the idea for this edited volume. Thanks to the financial support of the FWF, we were able to bring together academics from various areas of scholarship united in their passion for food issues and empirical contexts. With first draft in hand, the contributors to this book met in person for a writer’s workshop at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna in March 2017. This intensive workshop was crucial in terms of co-reviewing the drafts, thereby refining the book’s common thread of food anxiety and (hopefully) turning it into a coherent volume. Besides creating linkages between the individual chapters, the face-to-face discussions also established the necessary demarcation of thematically related chapters while creating inspiring dialogue about the particularities of the different disciplinary backgrounds of the authors. This workshop format offered an innovative space for in-depth scholarly debates and networking and – most of all – we definitely cherished the fun! As our get-together was hosted at the ‘academic home’ of the editors, we would like to thank our colleagues at the Department for Development Studies at the University of Vienna.