PhD Candidate THi Minh Ha Bui

Thi Minh Ha Bui is a sociologist and lecturer at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City. Her research has long focused on how people and communities understand and respond to environmental and socio-economic change, particularly in Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta. Her earlier work has addressed flooding, vulnerability, adaptation, migration and the social organisation of responses to environmental risks.

Within PREFER, Thi Minh Ha’s priority field country is Vietnam, with her research centred on communities in the Mekong Delta, particularly in Bến Tre province. She brings to the project both a long-standing knowledge of Vietnamese society and a close engagement with the communities involved in the research. Her work is concerned with how people themselves describe and interpret the changes affecting their lives and territories, and with the values that become visible through their stories and everyday practices.

In parallel with her work as a lecturer and researcher in Vietnam, Thi Minh Ha is undertaking a second PhD in social sciences at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), within PREFER and under the supervision of Jean-Paul Vanderlinden and Charlotte Da Cunha. Her doctoral research focuses on Vietnamese emic values: the locally grounded principles, values and ethical understandings through which people make sense of what matters, what is worth preserving, and how one should act in changing circumstances.
Her work combines sociological and qualitative approaches with sustained field engagement and a particular interest in storytelling. For PREFER, this provides an important bridge between the empirical study of profound environmental and socio-economic change and the project’s broader attempt to understand the moral grammars through which people interpret what is happening to their worlds.

Thi Minh Ha’s position is also distinctive within PREFER because she conducts this research from within the Vietnamese academic and social context to which the project is contributing. Her dual position as a Vietnamese university lecturer and a doctoral researcher within an international research project enables her to move between different academic traditions and forms of knowledge while keeping local experiences and understandings at the centre of the inquiry.