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One year after the COVID-19 pandemic started, a new e-book features ideas and experiences from all over the world how societies could prevent similar cascading disruptions in social, economic and political and institutional life in the future. More than 100 authors from all continents contributed to the project which is entitled “INTERSECTING”. In over 50 contributions they are calling to team up and create the infrastructure of a new sustainable economy. Richly illustrated by dozens of original photographs, INTERSECTING is an epic journey from ‘disease’ to multilateral ‘agendas’. It portrays a major crisis of our urban age, which beyond the pandemic, is one of profound mutations and geopolitical shifts, where people’s and cities’ voices need to be heard.

In the aftermath of a mass fish death along the coastal area of Central Vietnam in April 2016, disdain and frustration of the public soon escalated into widespread protests. These protests arose in response to evasion and oppressive tactics from the government. Using discourse analysis, this chapter identifies the different narratives between the government and the activists. This mismatch reveals challenges to governance in Vietnam in the form of a lack of participatory platform. The chapter explores how the theme of fish contributed to the narrative of protestors in rural and urban areas in Vietnam and where they differ. Our analysis indicates that food, as a socio-political lens, has seemingly unified the voices of rural and urban protestors and might have potential to consolidate the existing discourses on civil society. The socio-political imagery of masses of dead fish depicted a life-threatening reality that transcended mere everyday discomfort or technical failures. The fish death, as reconstructed through various media sources, highlighted the role of food as a medium for transboundary socio-political activism. In this sense, food and the related discourse has a bounding effect on some narratives but also functions as a frame to illustrate the challenged relationship between the government and its people.

This paper is grounded on the case of mass fish death at the Central coastal area of the country in 2016. Using Wells-Dang’s “rice-roots democracy” and Hannah’s functional approach to civil society, preliminary results show that civil society actors in the case have relied on the fundamental value associated with the notion of food to challenge the authorities under a façade of apoliticality. Discourse analysis, based on both visual and textual data, reveals that civil society in Vietnam, while limited in their institutionally confrontational capacity, utilises the politics of daily life to advance its causes while minimizing the risk of political sanctions from the government. Specifically, the connotation of “food” as a crucial necessity of daily life allows the civil society actors to voice their political concerns in what they perceived to be an apolitical manner.

This snapshot provokes both theoretical and empirical investigation into the use of food by civil society (CS) actors in their attempt to construct a pro-transparency discourse. Based on Wells-Dang’s conceptualisation of “rice-roots democracy”, the analysis aims to illustrate food grievance as a discursive element, connecting the fish death to issue of transparency and allowing CS actors to maintain a façade of apoliticality. This role complements “rice-roots democracy”, in which CS optimises limited political space to voice their critique without risking sanctions from the state. The picture was collected as part of the data for an ongoing PhD research focusing on environmental civil society in Vietnam. The data was collected from Instagram using the hashtag #ichoosefish, which was created during the controversy around an industry waste-induced mass fish death in Central Vietnam in 2016. The picture, thus, combines elements of collective actions and food/environment activism themes to create a message inviting researchers to question the existence of current forms of participation in authoritarian Vietnam, the dilemma of economic growth and environmental conservation, and the need for an action-based research design in the peculiar context. The picture’s role is not only inspirational, but also informative, in a sense that it belongs to a greater structure of visual data that, in combination with textual data, would help to reveal the specific pathways wherein civil society actors in Vietnam, be it intentionally or not, optimise their limited political space.