The FRACA will have the honor of welcoming a prestigious guest on March 18. Edyta Roszko, a researcher in social anthropology and professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway, will be joining us. She will present the results of her research, which will be published in an upcoming book entitled When Water Binds the World: Global Hydroconnectivities and Making of Planetary Histories. Come and listen to a true enthusiast, for whom Vietnam is a laboratory for reflection on the world and the planet.
Presentation title:
When Water Binds the World: Global Hydroconnectivities and Making of Planetary Histories
Presentation abstract:
Taking Vietnam as a ‘theoretical laboratory for the World’ (Salemink 2019), the talk addresses pressing questions at the intersection of Indigenous histories, planetary thinking, and water politics—issues that resonate deeply in the context of accelerating climate change and global water scarcity. Coastal and island communities in Vietnam and beyond are among the most vulnerable to rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion, and shifting hydrological regimes. Yet, dominant narratives of connectivity and global history continue to privilege oceans as abstract highways of trade, overlooking the socio-material infrastructures – such as freshwater wells or water reservoirs – that made mobility and survival possible. As climate change intensifies, understanding these entangled temporalities and hydrological practices is not only an academic exercise but a critical intervention. It compels us to rethink planetary futures through the lens of Indigenous epistemologies and material infrastructures that have long sustained mobility, exchange, and resilience.
Short biography:
Edyta Roszko is a Research Professor and social anthropologist at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and a Guest Professor in Global History and Human Rights at Lund University (2026–2028). Her expertise is rooted in East and Southeast Asia, yet marked by a global perspective and a theoretical commitment to understanding how societies navigate economic and climate precarity in an era of intensifying global interdependence.
Her broader intellectual interests bridge the conceptual divide between land and sea, examining oceans, mobility, migration, and ecological transformations – including climate change and sea‑level rise – through their deep historical and contemporary entanglements. She is the author of Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam, published by the University of Hawai‘i Press. She is currently working on her second book, When Water Binds the World: Global Hydroconnectivities and the Making of Planetary Histories, which investigates the interplay between Holocene sea‑level fluctuations, Austronesian island settlement, and the contemporary climate crisis from an anthropological perspective.
