IDCE Faculty

Ken MacLean, Ph.D.

Education

Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (2005)
M.S. School of Natural Resources and Environment, U. Michigan-Ann Arbor (2004)
B.A. Anthropology, Princeton University (1990)

Biography

KEN MACLEAN is an Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change, the current Coordinator for the IDSC Undergraduate Program, and the Director of Asian Studies. He holds degrees in Ph.D. in Anthropology (University of Michigan 2005); M.S. in Environment Justice (School of Natural Resources and the Environment, University of Michigan 2004), B.A. in Anthropology (Princeton University, 1990). Before coming to Clark University, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Comparative and International Studies (Emory University, 2005-2007).

MacLean conducts research in mainland Southeast Asia (primarily Vietnam and Burma) as well as the greater South China Sea. His current topical interests include ethnographic approaches to the study of: States and State-Effects, Violence and Repression, Forced and Irregular Migration, (Post-) Socialism, Legal Regimes and Documentation, Critical Security Studies, and Digital Communicate Technologies.

Selected Publications

2013 “The Enterprising Cadre,” in Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity: Vietnam, ed. Erik Harms, Joshua Barker, and Johan Lindquist (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press)

2012 “Bodies in Perpetual Motion: Struggles over the Meaning, Value, and Purpose of Fuzzy Labor on the Eve of Collectivization,” in State, Society, and Market in Contemporary Vietnam: Property, Power, and Values, ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai and Mark Selden, pp. 33-54 (London: Routledge).

2012 “Enacting Anti-Corruption: The Reconfiguration of Audit Regimes in Contemporary Vietnam,” positions: asia critique 20(2): 595-625.

2012 “Lawfare and Impunity in Burma since the 2000 Ban on Forced Labor,” Asian Studies Review June (36): 189-206.

2010 “The Collected Works of the Communist Party: The Possibilities and Limits of Official Representations of Actually Existing Government,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 5(2): 195-207 [Invited Contribution for a Special Forum edited by Tuong Vu].

2010  “The Emergence of Private Indirect Government in Burma.” In Finding Dollars, Sense, and Legitimacy in Burma, ed. Susan Levenstein, pp. 40-53 (Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars).

2008 “In Search of Kilometer Zero: Digital Archives, Technological Revisionism, and the Sino-Vietnamese Border,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50(4): 862-894.

2008 “The Rehabilitation of an Uncomfortable Past: Remembering the Everyday in Vietnam during the Subsidy Period (1975-1986),” History and Anthropology 19(3): 281-303.

2008“Sovereignty after the Entrepreneurial Turn: Mosaics of Control, Commodified Spaces, and Regulated Violence in Contemporary Burma,” in Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature, and People in a Neoliberal Age, ed., Nancy Peluso and Joe Nevins, pp. 140-157 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

2007 “Manifest Socialism: The Labor of Representation in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1956-1959),” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 2(1): 27-79.

2007 “Spaces of Extraction: Actually Existing Governance along the Riverine Networks of Nyaunglebin District,” in Myanmar: the State, Community and the Environment, ed. Monique Skidmore and Trevor Wilson, pp. 246-267 (Canberra: Asia-Pacific Press, Australian National University).

2004 “Reconfiguring the Debate on Engagement: Burma and the Changing Politics of Aid,” Critical Asian Studies 36(3): 323-54.

2000 “Constructing Civil Society: Assessing Participatory Development in Contemporary Vietnam.” In Globalization and the Asian Economic Crisis: Indigenous Responses, Coping Strategies and Governance Reform in Southeast Asia), ed. Geoffrey Hainsworth, pp. 473-483 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia).

Selected Conference and Workshop Presentations

2012 “Tactical Aid: Cross-Border Humanitarian Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons in Burma’s Conflict Zones,” States at Risk Workshop on Engaged Scholarship, Emory University.

2012 “Digital Patriots: Hacking in Defense of the Vietnamese Nation,” Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

2011“Spheres of Influence: Calculating Corporate Accountability in Burma,” Executive Session at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

2011“Patriotism with Vietnamese Characteristics: A Genealogy of an Idea and its Effects,” Workshop on Rethinking Revolution in Vietnam, University of California-Berkeley.

2011 “The Counter-Revolution that Never Came: The Illegibility of Sabotage in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1954-1958),” Colloquium Program for Agrarian Studies, Yale University.

2011“The Politics of Protection: The Possibilities and Limits of Humanitarian Action,” International Summit on Armed Conflict, Scarce Resources and the Congo, Clark University.

Courses

Community Development and Planning
  Trafficking: Globalization and Its Illicit Commodities
  States of Violence: Culture, Trauma, and Identity in Asia / Seminar
  Critical Cartographies: Mapping Culture, History, and Power
  Trafficking: Globalization and Its Illicit Commodities
  Seeing Like a Humanitarian Agency
  States of Violence: Culture, Trauma, and Identity in Asia / Seminar
  Critical Cartographies: Mapping Culture, History, and Power
  
  Environmental Science and Policy
  Trafficking: Globalization and Its Illicit Commodities
  Seeing Like a Humanitarian Agency
  States of Violence: Culture, Trauma, and Identity in Asia / Seminar
  Critical Cartographies: Mapping Culture, History, and Power
  
  Geographic Information Sciences for Development and Environment
  Trafficking: Globalization and Its Illicit Commodities
  Seeing Like a Humanitarian Agency
  States of Violence: Culture, Trauma, and Identity in Asia / Seminar
  Critical Cartographies: Mapping Culture, History, and Power
  
  International Development and Social Change
  Trafficking: Globalization and Its Illicit Commodities
  Seeing Like a Humanitarian Agency
  States of Violence: Culture, Trauma, and Identity in Asia / Seminar
  Critical Cartographies: Mapping Culture, History, and Power
  Trafficking: Globalization and Its Illicit Commodities
  Seeing Like a Humanitarian Agency
  States of Violence: Culture, Trauma, and Identity in Asia / Seminar
  Critical Cartographies: Mapping Culture, History, and Power
  Senior Capstone - The Political-Economy and Ethics of Eating
  Visualizing Human Rights:   Culture, Law, and the Politics of Representation

Related Links

  
•   International Development and Social Change