Past Projects

As husband and wife: tradition and modernity in the Vietnamese Portable Family

Vietnam emerged as a rice production giant in the 1990s due to the Doi Moi policies of the late 1980s that encouraged rural-to-urban migration. My exploration of individual experiences of migration probes how men and women are disrupting conventional identities and gender performativity in an increasingly mobile family unit. The study finds that migrant women and the men they leave behind negotiate what the article calls a “Portable Family” identity, based on actions rather than interactions, and oscillating between the urban-productive home and the rural-reproductive home. In essence, rather than disintegrating the family unit, Vietnamese Portable Families are evolving and growing stronger. Unlike other studies of migration and identity in Vietnam, this work gathered data from male and female subjects, and was based in Southern Vietnam where there is a dearth of such investigation. This article is currently under review at Geoforum.

Sustainable and conventional intensification: how gendered livelihoods influence farming practice adoption in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta

Vietnam’s Doi Moi policies privatized land rights in favor of male ownership and promoted adoption of Green Revolution intensive farming practices. The government is currently promoting a sustainable intensification (SI) to reduce environmental impacts resulting from the annual triple rice crop regime. My household-level research, published in Environment, Development, and Sustainability in 2020, surveys gendered adoption of the policy. The research finds that female farm plots have significantly lower SI practice adoption, and that there is an indirect gendered impact due to unequal access to natural and human capital that help increase SI adoption. The article concludes with a push for gender-sensitive policy, demonstrating that improved women-only trainings would increase the efficacy of the Vietnamese sustainable farm policy. This article contributes empirical evidence toward understanding the tension between SI and Green Revolution practice adoption, and uniquely explores the gendered implications of the recent SI policy in Vietnamese agriculture.

Identifying Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) Adoption in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta: A Change Detection Approach

As part of their SI policy, Vietnam promotes AWD, a water-saving rice farming practice. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to determine AWD adoption without deploying thousands of costly household surveys, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of sustainable water policy across the delta. My geospatial research uses remote sensing to determine whether rice producers are adopting AWD. Using European Space Agency Sentinel-1a and 1b radar data, combined with in-situ moisture readings, I work with ArcGIS and Python to determine AWD adoption through change detection of a time series wetness index. The analysis illustrates an AWD adoption likelihood scale across the delta, showing potential for estimating adoption rates by season and across large areas. The results of this study, a methodological innovation, were published in ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Informatics in 2019. I am currently working with the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, along with the International Rice Research Institute, to further develop the approach to estimate the carbon sequestration potential of AWD.