Project 0395A.ĐC | Performing disorientation

The end of the Vietnam/American War lead to one of the largest exoduses of the latter part of the twentieth century: more than 3 million people escaped from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos over the course of two decades starting in 1975, many by boat and an estimated 1 million died at sea. How do you witness and retell stories of violence in the aftermath of war and dispossession at sea in the context of U.S. empire and Vietnamese socialist revolution? Project 0395A.?C, a multi-media installation by Vietnamese artist, Ly Hoang Ly, intentionally structures and choreographs disorientation to grapple with the condition of being dispossessed at sea, as the Vietnamese refugee is suspended at sea and entangled in histories of French colonialism and caught at the crux of U.S. imperial war and Vietnamese socialist revolution. I argue that disorientation is a performative experience and method that performs an act of refusal to break voyeuristic modes of consuming histories of violence and reorients the body to another theory of Vietnamese refugee subjectivity. I analyze how Ly creates a performative installation and performs with water as the core aesthetic material used to frame, dialogue, and re-narrate a story of Vietnamese refugee subjectivity.     

VIETNAM-US PARTNERSHIP: PILLARS AND PROSPECTS

This essay analyses the foundations and future of the Vietnam-US partnership. It shows that Vietnam and the United States have sought to broaden and deepen the bilateral relations in three main areas: (i) trade and investment relations, (ii) political and security relations, and (iii) people-to-people cooperation. These areas continue to be the pillars for Vietnam and the United States to build up their ties. Given China's growing assertiveness in the South China Sea and the United States rebalance to the Asia-Pacific, Vietnam and the United States will become closer and will work together to add strategic values to their partnership.     

Capitalizing on Criminal Accomplices: Considering the Relationship between Co-offending and Illegal Earnings

This study investigates whether co-offending offers an avenue towards criminal success. Specifically, it considers if current and prior co-offending experience is related to the probability of reporting illegal earnings as well as the amount of these earnings. Using data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, we estimated fixed-and random-effects models to test whether co-offending experience is related to self-reported illegal earnings. The models also estimated whether “historical” co-offending experience predicted current illegal earnings. Across both modeling strategies, current and historical co-offending predicted the probability of reporting non-zero illegal earnings, net of offending frequency and controls. There is minimal evidence of a relationship between co-offending experience and the amount of illegal earnings, however. These findings lead us to conclude that access to a relatively common criminal connection—the co-offender—offers tangible benefits to adolescent offenders, primarily by affecting their ability to translate criminal opportunities into monetary gain.     

Law and Precariousness in an Authoritarian State: The Case of Illegal House Construction in Vietnam

While sociolegal research in authoritarian regimes has examined the cultural and regulatory factors accounting for why and how people bypass, manipulate, or resist the law, little attention has been paid to an important double-edged effect of law in legitimating and sanctioning subversive or illegal behavior. Through an examination of illegal house construction in peri-urban Vietnam, this study fills this gap by drawing attention to the relationship between law and precariousness. Precariousness influences individuals’ perceptions of and behavior toward the law; at the same time, however, law creates and reinforces precariousness, a condition of vulnerability and uncertainty subject to the local state's discretion and compassion.     

La bureautique et la bureaucratie: le cas d'un organisme du secteur public québécois

Sommaire: Les gouvernements se fient de plus en plus aux technologies de l'information afin de rendre plus efficaces leurs prises de décision et l'offre de services publics. Cette situation souligne bien la pertinence d'un examen des effets de l'introduction de l'informatique dans un univers bureaucratique. Plusieurs auteurs affirment que la technologie peut rendre l'administration publique moins bureaucratique à travers une décentralisation des décisions, étant donné qu'elle favoriserait une communication plus directe entre les employés, faciliterait un accès plus immédiat aux informations et permettrait une production plus autonome et plus valorisée. Toutefois, les résultats d'une enquête portant sur les effets de la bureautique concernant le fonctionnement des usagers-opérateurs dans un organisme du gouvernement du Québec, montrent que l'insistance des organisations publiques à utiliser la bureautique comme moyen d'augmenter la productivité et l'efficacité de leurs services, pourrait renforcer leur caractère bureaucratique. Abstract: Governments are increasingly relying on information technology in order to increase the effectiveness of decision-making and the delivery of public services. This emphasizes the relevance of examining the effects of introducing computers within the bureaucratic environment. Several authors state that technology can make public administration less bureaucratic by decentralizing decision-making, since it promotes more direct communications between employees, facilitates more immediate access to information, and permits more independent, empowered production. However, the results of an investigation into the impact of office computerization on the functioning of user-operators within a Quebec government organization show that the insistence of public organizations on using computerization as a means for raising the productivity and efficiency of their services could in fact strengthen their bureaucratic nature.     

I tweet like a white person tbh! #whitewashed: examining the language of internalized racism and the policing of ethnic identity on Twitter

Using data extracted from Twitter, this study analyzes the English expression whitewashed as it occurs with and without a hashtag (e.g.: #whitewashed vs. whitewashed) through corpus analysis. As whitewashed has evolved to take on racial connotations to mean being too assimilated to a dominant white culture, I investigate whether the presence of a hashtag has an effect on how often this racial meaning of English whitewashed is employed. Based on collocative data, the findings suggest that the use of #whitewashed carries a meaning predominately informed by internalized racism and works to bind ethnic minorities to racial stereotypes. The study explores #whitewashed as a metacomment on human behavior, as #whitewashed serves to characterize beliefs about what actions are considered socially marked when performing an ethnic identity. In contrast to #whitewashed is the colloquial expression fobby, which characterizes an individual as being “too ethnic”; both (#)whitewashed and (#)fobby are discussed in tandem in this paper, for they create a double bind that marks the boundaries of ethnic identity. In this paper, I suggest that Twitter users mediate the demands of internalized racism by using #whitewashed to mark their tweets.     

Sequence variation in humans and other primates at six short tandem repeat loci used in forensic identity testing

A large number of alleles from the six different short tandem repeat (STR) loci FGA, D3S1358, vWA, CSF1PO, TPOX and TH01, used in human identity testing were sequenced to provide support for the robustness of fluorescent STR DNA typing by allele size. Sequence information for some of these loci (FGA, vWA, TH01) is an extension of published work, whereas no extensive sequence information is available with respect to the D3S1358, CSF1PO, and TPOX loci. Sequencing of alleles at each locus has provided quantitative data with respect to the true nucleotide length of common alleles, and of alleles that vary in length from the common alleles. All alleles that were identified as "off-ladder" alleles through fluorescent typing at these STR loci have proven to be true length variant alleles. Sequencing at the D3S1358 and CSF1PO loci allowed for the establishment of a common nomenclature for these loci. A correlation between percent stutter and the length of the core tandem repeat is demonstrated at the FGA locus. Alleles in which the core tandem repeat is interrupted by a repeat unit of different sequence have a reduced percent stutter. DNA samples from three non-human primates (chimpanzee, orangutan, and gorilla) were compared to the human sequences, and shown to differ markedly across loci with respect to their homology. The effects of primer binding site mutations on the amplification efficiency at a particular locus, and methods used to interpret amplification imbalance of heterozygous alleles at a locus is also addressed.     

Legal challenges to combating cybercrime: An approach from Vietnam

Crime, Law and Social Change - This paper explores the legal challenges of combating cybercrime in Vietnam. We used a legal doctrine method to review the updated Vietnamese legal frameworks,...