# Christina Schwenkel, "Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi" (U California Press, 2025)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/beyond-the-margins-the-university-of-california-press-podcast-7096692/christina-schwenkel-sonic-socialism-crisis-and-care-in-pandemic-hanoi-u-california-press-2025
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/beyond-the-margins-the-university-of-california-press-podcast-7096692/christina-schwenkel-sonic-socialism-crisis-and-care-in-pandemic-hanoi-u-california-press-2025.md
Podcast: [Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/beyond-the-margins-the-university-of-california-press-podcast-7096692)
Published: 2026-03-31T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK1667673271.mp3?updated=1774861121
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK1667673271.mp3?updated=1774861121
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Duration seconds: 4188

## Resource

In an era dominated by visual information, what can the sounds of a pandemic reveal about crisis and care? How might attuning to sonic atmospheres uncover new dimensions to states of emergency and their implications for collective life? In Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi (U California Press, 2025), Christina Schwenkel examines the use of sound in COVID-19 response efforts in urban Vietnam. Based on “soundwork” conducted in Hanoi in 2020 during the pandemic’s first year, she shows how acoustic technologies played a pivotal yet overlooked role in state efforts to achieve record-low infection rates worldwide. Across lived experiences of quarantine, lockdown, and spatial distancing, Schwenkel explores sound-based interventions to curb virus transmission, and the public’s response to these auditory measures. From instant messaging alerts to public health videos and neighborhood loudspeakers, sonic governance sought to transform urban sounds and listening practices to mobilize action, drawing people into networks of care and control. As anthropology stands at a crossroads, Sonic Socialism makes the compelling case for the value of sensory autoethnography in reimagining a more careful and caring ethnographic practice in a post-pandemic world. Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She currently serves on the Editorial Committee of University of California Press and is Vice Chair of the AAS Publications Editorial Board. Her research examines the material legacies of infrastructural warfare in urban Vietnam and the Cold War circulations of people, objects, design technologies, and architectural practices among socialist-allied countries in its wake. She is the author of The Amer…

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