The 10th Engaging With Vietnam Conference

We would like to announce that the 10th Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue Conference will be held from 15-21 December 2018 in Hồ Chí Minh City and Phan Thiết, Bình Thuận. The theme of this year’s conference is “Beyond Dichotomies: Vietnam from Multiple Perspectives.” The deadline to submit individual or panel proposals is 30 September 2018 and notification will be made by 30 October 2018 (earlier submissions are welcome and early notifications can be accommodated).

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K-Pop River Tourism in Vietnam

The most recent Engaging With Vietnam conference (the 9th) focused on the topics of tourism, development, sustainability, and the preservation of heritage/culture. In the case of Vietnam, these topics are particularly fascinating and relevant ones as over the past two decades the country has witnessed a massive expansion of the tourism sector as business people have sought to cater to the ever-growing number of both domestic and international tourists.

Such a transformation of course brings both positive and negative changes, and this in turn highlights the many issues that the development of tourism encompasses, and the many questions the development of tourism raises.

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Islands and Change

I’ve spent my entire adult life on islands – 6 years on Taiwan and 23 years on Oahu (Hawaii) – and all of the professional knowledge that I have today was learned on those islands.

When I arrived on Taiwan in the summer of 1989, I only knew one word in Chinese – xiexie, “thank you” – and basically did not know anything about the history of any Asian society.

I’ve learned a lot since then, and I’ve also seen so much change since then.

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Historians and Historical Scholarship in the Digital Age

About a week ago, historian Vũ Đức Liêm published an article in the online journal Tia Sáng on “‘Small,’ ‘Brief’ and ‘Narrow’ Histories or a Crisis of Historical Scholarship?” (Những lịch sử “nhỏ”, “ngắn”, “hẹp” hay khủng hoảng của sử học?).

In this article, Vũ Đức Liêm notes that we are living in a time when there are many people who feel that historical scholarship is facing a crisis as students do not seem to be interested in studying it, and historians have little prominence or influence in society. He examines this issue and suggests that there are types of historical scholarship that Vietnamese historians could produce that would be of more interest to the public.

 

Tia Sang Liem2

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