Martha Lincoln

Addresses cancer patients’ use of online crowdfunding to reduce medical expenses and analyzes the complex and often contradictory narrative incentives with which they are confronted.

Provides background for four commentaries on the public prosecution of individuals in public office charged with offenses related to their handling of Vietnam’s program of repatriating nationals back to Vietnam during the global coronavirus pandemic.

Provides a definition of cancer, its various causes, cultural meanings, and treatment options (including newly emerging ones). Addresses the lack of balance in anthropological literature on cancer, particularly for female reproductive cancers outside of North America and Europe.

Addresses the controversial reception of Bảo Ninh's novel Nỗi buồn chiến tranh (The Sorrow of War) in Vietnam.

Discusses how the United States' response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been hindered by American exceptionalism—a cultural sense of specialness and superiority imagined as unique to the US. Argues that both presidential administrations have prioritized individual freedoms and resisted pandemic control measures that were successful in other countries, leading to less effective public health strategies.

Explores the potential analytic and disciplinary payoffs of yet more focused and intentional inquiries into the politics of life across Vietnamese contexts.

Examines the shifting biopolitical significance of poverty in Vietnam’s post-reform period.

Focuses on a series of cholera outbreaks in Northern Vietnam between 2007 and 2010, exploring the political, economic, and infrastructural factors behind these epidemics. Suggests how the most commonly repeated accounts of disease spread misdirected public attention and suppressed awareness of risk factors in Vietnam's capital.

Discusses the concept of "necrosecurity," which refers to the cultural idea that mass death among less grievable subjects plays an essential role in maintaining social welfare and public order.

Uses a series of cholera outbreaks as a jumping-off point to explore the cultural politics of infectious disease in Vietnam, where transition to a market economy has complicated collective views of risk, morality, and responsibility.