BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//EuroSEAS 2024//EN X-WR-CALNAME:EuroSEAS 2024 BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/Amsterdam X-LIC-LOCATION:Europe/Amsterdam BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 DTSTART:19700329T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=-1SU END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 DTSTART:19701025T030000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=10;BYDAY=-1SU END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20240919T040100 UID:euroseas-2024-the-good-life-in-late-socialist-asia-aspirations-politics-and-possibilities SUMMARY:The Good Life in Late Socialist Asia: Aspirations, Politics, and Possibilities LOCATION:REC A2.10 DESCRIPTION:This roundtable launches the special issue The Good Life in Lat e Socialist Asia: Aspirations, Politics, and Possibilities edited by Minh T . N. Nguyen, Phill Wilcox, and Jake Lin published by positions: asia critiq ue (Duke University Press) in early 2024.\n\nThe emergent quest for the goo d life in rapidly transforming Vietnam, Laos, and China can only be underst ood as part of the political economy of late socialism where capitalist mar ket expansion unfolds under the purview of Communist party states. As a col lection of nine articles by Kirsten Endres (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Arve Hansen (University of Oslo), Roberta Zavoretti (Univer sity of Cologne), Sandra Kurfurst (University of Cologne), Jiazhi Fengjiang (University of Edinburgh), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Cologne), Elizabeth Elliott (National University of Singapore), Fan Zhang (Peking Uni versity), Michael Kleinod (University of Cologne) and an epilogue by Li Zha ng (UC Davis), the special issue is a timely critical engagement with the n otion of the good life and its ramifications in late-socialist social life through the perspectives of people and communities living amid rapid politi cal and economic transformation. While growth-based development offers vist as of possibility that are wider than ever, it has also engendered growing social inequality, ecological decline and a broad sense of moral crisis, in the face of state narratives about national dreams in the making. Here, pe ople grapple with the question of how they can – individually and collectiv ely – shape lives that they consider worth living.\n\nThe special issue dem onstrates how the paradoxical value frameworks of late socialism generate c ontradictions and politics that impose limits on the possibilities of livin g well together. At the same time, the authors also show the moral agency o f people circulating between seemingly incommensurable social orders in art iculating their notions of the good and the motivations for their actions. With contributions from all three late socialist contexts, the special issu e underscores how the quest for the good life is an uneven field of struggl e in which people seek to build futures from differing social positions in increasingly differentiated societies. Contributors to this roundtable are the authors of articles in the special issue and two discussants who critic ally engage with the themes raised by the special issue and its contributio ns to raise further questions for discussion. It is meant to be a dialogue between the panellists and the Euroseas audience.\n\nThe roundtable is an a ctivity of WelfareStruggles, a project that received funding from the Europ ean Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Research and Innovation program (Grant agreement No 803614). URL:https://euroseas2024.org/panels/the-good-life-in-late-socialist-asia-aspirations-politics-and-possibilities DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Amsterdam:20240725T090000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/Amsterdam:20240725T103000 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR