Jean Michaud is Professor of Anthropology at Université Laval, Canada. Since the late 1980s he has conducted field research in India, Thailand and Vietnam. His research interests lie in understanding the rapport ethnic minorities have with modernity, the state and market forces. He has published in Current Anthropology, Anthropology Today and The Journal of Global History among others. He has authored, coauthored, edited or coedited books with University of Hawai’I Press, University of Washington Press, University of British Columbia Press and Brill among others, including The Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif, second edition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). He served as president of the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies in 2021–23."

Sarah Turner is Professor in the Department of Geography, McGill University, Canada. Her research focuses on the ways by which individuals who find themselves somehow marginalized, be it economically, politically or ethnically, make a living in rural and urban Asia. Her current projects include a focus on ethnic minority livelihoods in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, including farmer everyday politics when faced with inappropriate agrarian programmes and infrastructure projects. She also studies informal economy livelihoods and resistance tactics of street vendors, motorbike taxi drivers and three-wheeler delivery drivers in Hanoi, Vietnam. She coauthored Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands with Christine Bonnin and Jean Michaud (University of Washington Press, 2015), and coedited Fragrant Frontier: Global Spice Entanglements from the Sino-Vietnamese Uplands with Annuska Derks and Jean-François Rousseau (NIAS Press/NUS, 2022). She is an editor of Geoforum and recent former editor of Journal of Vietnamese Studies.