Vietnam at the Vanguard

This transdisciplinary edited book explores new developments and perspectives on global Vietnam, touching on aspects of history, identity, transnational mobilities, heritage, belonging, civil society, linguistics, education, ethnicity, and worship practices. Derived from the Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue conference series, this cutting-edge collection presents new scholarship and also represents new ways of knowing global Vietnam. Over the past 10 years, knowledge production about Vietnam has diversified in various ways as globalization, the internationalization of higher education, and the digital revolution have transformed the world, as well as Vietnam. Whereas as late as a decade ago, knowledge about Vietnam was still largely the preserve of scholars in Vietnam and a coterie of related experts outside of the country at a select few universities, today we find scholars working on Vietnam in myriad contexts. This transformation has introduced new voices and new perspectives, which this book champions. A critical text engaging a range of historical and contemporary debates about Vietnam, this book is an indispensable volume for the Southeast Asian Studies student and scholar in the humanities and social sciences.

Jamie Gillen is Senior Lecturer and Director of Global Studies Programme at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Dr Gillen specializes in human geographies of Southeast Asia, and Vietnam in particular. He is interested in cultural politics, rural–urban relations, tourism encounters, and the idiosyncrasies of fieldwork. Dr Gillen has published one monograph and numerous papers in geography, tourism, and urban studies debates. Recent research has been in agrarian change and livelihood diversification in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, resulting in a co-edited volume entitled Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective (2019, Amsterdam University Press) with Eric Thompson and Jonathan Rigg.

Liam C. Kelley is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He is also the co-organizer of the Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue conference series. His research focuses on premodern Vietnamese and Southeast Asian history, as well as the ways in which the past is continuously re-purposed in the modern and contemporary eras. Professor Kelley also shares his historical knowledge on the Internet and YouTube under the name “Le Minh Khai blog”.

PHAN Le Ha (PhD), founder of Engaging With Vietnam, is Senior Professor at Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education and Head of the International and Comparative Education Research Group at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Prior to Brunei, Prof Phan was tenured Full Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where she maintains her affiliation, and Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Australia. She has taught and written extensively on English language education, identity-language-culture-pedagogy, global/international/transnational higher education, academic mobilities, and sociology of knowledge. Her research work has covered many contexts in Asia, the Asia-Pacific and the Gulf regions.