We spoke with Professor Sarah Turner about her ethnographic fieldwork in Southeast Asia. We discuss the significance of and challenges facing the informal labor economy, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on this market, and approaches and strategies to qualitative fieldwork and development practice. 

Sarah Turner is a professor in the Department of Geography at McGill University. Her research focuses on everyday livelihoods in Asia, specifically upland ethnic minorities in peninsula Southeast Asia and southwest China, Hanoi small-scale traders and street vendors, and Eastern Indonesia entrepreneurs. She has completed fieldwork in multiple countries in the region and anchors her research and practice in local knowledge and day-to-day realities. Her most recent book, Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands, which was released in 2015 is an ethnography of cross-border dynamics between ethnic minority Hmong communities in Vietnam and China's Yunnan Province. She co-edited a forthcoming book Fragrant Frontier: Global Spice Entanglements from the Sino-Vietnamese Uplands that explores the modern Spice Trade in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands and will be released this year. 

Candid Conversations is a series where we speak with professors and academics about their research and current topics in development related to their field of study.

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