The “Grand Event” of the 15th Engaging With Vietnam (EWV) conference, to celebrate the conference’s fifteenth anniversary, will be held in Hanoi from 12-16 December 2025 with the collaborative support of the School of Interdisciplinary Sciences and Arts, Vietnam National University Hanoi (SIS-VNU Hanoi).
The theme is “Knowledge Production, Creative Industries, Education, and the AI Age in Vietnam: Looking Back and Moving Forward.”
“Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue” is a conference series that was founded in 2010 by scholar Phan Le Ha who was at the time based at Monash University in Australia.
I participated in the third conference, in Hanoi in 2011, and then started co-organizing it the following year, in 2012 in Honolulu.
There are three main people behind the conference. Phan Le Ha is the visionary who makes and fosters all the human connections that enable each conference to happen and to be unique and up-to-date by bringing people together in fruitful collaborations. I process the submissions, create the program, do all the web stuff, make the print program, etc. And Le Thuy Linh, who has been with the conference from the start, handles the behind-the-scenes logistics so that everything actually happens.
Then for each conference, there is always a small but essential team from whichever university we are collaborating with (and we are always extremely grateful for their assistance and support!!) who work closely with us to guide us through the specifics of their institutional setting.
Finally, the conference is run on a shoestring. No one ever makes any money off it. The goal is always to cover the basic expenses, and no more. The costs are covered by collaborating institutions and partners, and if there is a conference fee, it is always as minimal as possible.
This “Grand Event” was preceded by two smaller “boutique events” as part of EWV’s 15th anniversary. So, this “15th” Grand Event conference is actually the seventeenth EWV conference.
That is a lot of conferences!! And we would like to thank everyone who has participated and supported the EWV initiative over those fifteen years!!!!!
If you are not familiar with conference, there is plenty of information on the website (https://engagingwithvietnam.org/), and for those interested in the “Grand Event,” the program is available here: https://engagingwithvietnam.org/ewv-15-grand-event/