Sarah Turner

Sarah Turner is a Professor in the Department of Geography at McGill University, Montréal, Canada, with significant research contributions in anthropological geography focused on Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. She also serves as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (VNU-USSH).

Her research agenda centers on everyday livelihoods across diverse Asian contexts, examining how people navigate cultural and social environments from Muslim Bugis small-scale traders in eastern Indonesia to highland Hmong ethnic minority semi-subsistence farmers in Northern Vietnam. She investigates how local people's decisions about success and development often diverge from external expectations yet remain rational within their specific contexts. This perspective informs her commitment to anchoring development thinking in the day-to-day realities of marginalized communities.

Professor Turner's extensive publication record reveals consistent themes across urban and rural Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Vietnam's northern regions. Her work examines street vendors, motorbike taxi drivers, ethnic minority livelihoods, and commodity chains, frequently highlighting tensions between local practices and state policies. Her methodological approaches are innovative, incorporating narrative mapping, walking-while-talking interviews, and collaborative oral histories to capture nuanced realities of research subjects.

• Eric Wolf Prize, Society for Applied Anthropology, 2022
• 'best overall paper' for Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography for 2021

Professor Turner has served in significant editorial roles including Editor of Geoforum (since 2018), Editorial Board Member of Pacific Affairs (since 2016), and Editor of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2020-2023). She has maintained an Editorial Board position with Asia Pacific Viewpoint since 2001, reflecting her longstanding commitment to scholarly discourse in her field. Her collaborative work extends across multiple institutions with particular engagement at Vietnamese academic centers.