[SydPhil] HPS Research Seminar, Monday 24 August 2026 at 5.30pm

[HPS Admin]

School of History and Philosophy of Science

RESEARCH SEMINAR

[The University of Sydney]

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A war inside a war: fighting drug addiction during the decolonization of Vietnam
Claire Eddington (University of California)

Dates: Monday, 24/08/2026
Start Time: 5:30pm
Venue: Madsen Building (F09), Room 331
How to register: Free, no registration required

Website: https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/Ws6ZC4QOPEimwkVZ4U3HGlh4-lK8?domain=t.e2ma.net>



Abstract: This talk opens in Hanoi on the eve of decolonization of French Indochina and the division of Vietnam into a Communist-controlled North, and a US-backed South. After decades of administering a state-run opium monopoly, in late 1953 the French government and its Vietnamese allies moved to ban all opium use and to require all drug users to register with the North Vietnam Health Service as an addict. This period of opium registration was short-lived. Nevertheless, the policy is significant to the extent that it signaled how a long-term crisis of addiction, fueled by expanding markets for drugs and hypodermic needles, joined with an acute political crisis to force an official reconsideration of approaches to recovery. At the same time, this talk attends to those other, shadowy networks, forged through rumor and gossip, that shaped how drug users themselves came to understand what was happening and how they thought about their own prospects for recovery. By writing drug users back into the history of drugs in the region, this talk asks what new storylines become possible.


Bio: Claire Edington is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California- San Diego where she specializes in the history of medicine and public health, modern Southeast Asian history, and colonial and postcolonial science studies. Her book, Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam, was published with Cornell University Press in 2019. Her second book with Cindy Ermus, Epidemics: A Global History, is forthcoming from University of California Press. She is currently researching the history of drug addiction in Vietnam across the twentieth century, from the time of the French colonial opium monopoly through the arrival of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.





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