Everyday disease diplomacy: an ethnographic study of diabetes self-care in Vietnam.

Background: Understanding people's subjective experiences of everyday lives with chronic health conditions such as diabetes is important for appropriate healthcare provisioning and successful self-care. This study explored how individuals with type 2 diabetes in northern Vietnam handle the everyday life work that their disease entails.

Methods: Detailed ethnographic data from 27 extended case studies conducted in northern Vietnam's Thái Bình province in 2018-2020 were analyzed.

Existential vulnerability: an ethnographic study of everyday lives with diabetes in Vietnam.

This article asks: how can the concept of existential vulnerability help us to comprehend the human impact of chronic disease? Across the globe, the prevalence of chronic health conditions is rising dramatically, with wide-ranging consequences for human lives. Taking type II diabetes in northern Vietnam as its ethnographic case, this study explores how chronic health conditions are woven into everyday lives, altering subjectivities and social relations. Applying the notion of existential vulnerability as its analytical prism, the article explores three different dimensions of vulnerability: physical, emotional, and social.