 Hi, welcome to Global Connections on ThinkTech's live-streaming network series, broadcasting here in downtown Honolulu in the Pioneer Plaza. I'm Grace Cheng, your host for the show today, and I have with us today our guest, Dr. Van Le Ha, professor at the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Dr. Liam Kelly, associate professor of history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Today we'll be talking about the upcoming international conference on engaging with Vietnam that will be taking place at East West Center in October. And so before we move on to speak with our guests, I'd like to announce the first speaker of our presidential lecture series for the fall semester at Hawaii Pacific University. It will be Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, the vice president of conservation international on conservation policy. And prior to coming on to conservation international, minister Rodriguez was the minister of environment and energy at the Republic of Costa Rica. And he's also the founder and board member of numerous environmental NGOs in Costa Rica, as well as various research centers on tropical research in the country. So he will be speaking on the mouse that roared Costa Rica's paradigm shift on the road towards sustainable development. Next Wednesday, September 7th at 5.30 at the Aloha Tower Marketplace, multi-purpose room three. So for more information, please go to www.hpu.edu under the presidential lecture series. So I'm very happy to have you guys here today. My friends Le Ha and Liam. Yeah, good to see you. Yeah. Great to have you guys on. I've got I've known you all for a while now. Liam and I were students together going way back when in Vietnam studies at University of Hawaii. And I had the pleasure of attending the last engaging Vietnam in Vietnam. In Thailand. In Thailand. Yeah, in Thailand. 2013. 2013. Yeah. Yeah. So every year you guys put on this conference right in various sites. So we're really excited to talk about that here at Global Connections. This is your first time on Global Connections. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. It's my first time. Really great. So I mean I would love to like let you talk a little bit about yourselves like your background and you know where you're from, what your work is in and how you got into this project with Engaging Vietnam. Yeah actually we were talking about this this morning and it dawned on us that our backgrounds are in many ways are different but they converge in this conference. In that my background I come from somewhat like you from a kind of an area studies background where I grew up at a time when we didn't know anything or at least I didn't know much about Asia and I went to Taiwan after university study Chinese and then I wanted to go to graduate school but I couldn't imagine going to like the East Coast and studying about Asia in the snow. I wanted to be someplace that was more like Taiwan. I didn't know anything about Hawaii but it seemed like it must be more like Asia than the East Coast was and so I came here and studied Chinese history, Southeast Asian history and then by the by incredible luck I got a job right when I graduated and I've been here ever since. So I came here sort of in search of Asia whereas Leha's path is very different. She started in Asia and maybe you can tell. Yeah so you know my name is very confusing Phan Leha. Yeah so actually that is the origin of Vietnamese name so Phan is my family name so you're just so you know and so in case people wonder right. So I am I'm from Hanoi Vietnam and I moved to Hawaii recently from Melbourne Australia so you can see that you know just like what Liam said. I think I'm a product of a kind of post-doi mới and post-cold war and global Vietnam. Yeah so yeah so I think and engaging with Vietnam really reflects that global movement and global engagement that you know I somehow I would think experience as well as the experience is that so many people who have been joining the engaging with Vietnam conferences series including yourself and Pierre Axelin and Hike Nguyen from HPU. Yeah yeah and Doi Moi is you know what gave Vietnam the opening after 1986 and so this is you know where we see Vietnam becoming more integrated and very dynamic part of the global economy and society. Can you tell us a little bit more about Doi Moi for the audience members who might not know about it. Yeah it started in 1986 and at that at that time I was still very little so I learned about Doi Moi very much via my parents conversation and from whatever presented to us on our television so you know like black and white television those days and and so Doi Moi was a word that constantly emphasized emphasized and emphasized and repeated every day and now I'm really glad to see that Doi Moi has become an English part of the English language as well so when we talk about Doi Moi so it refers to you know reform or renovation you could say of the economy in Vietnam and started in 1986 is that right yeah right so I mean after several years of being in a sense a kind of closed off country in 86 Vietnam started to reform economically which is when we all got interested in it right I mean we're we're part of this first post more post Doi Moi foreign generation of people who became interested in Vietnam who went there who studied the language and started the research about it so not only did Vietnam open up itself and send its people out into the world but those of us who are outside of Vietnam also went to Vietnam at that time and continue to do so yeah and this is something that this engaging with Vietnam conferences is is is about right it's about like promoting Vietnam studies like in various different countries in the world like you've held this would be the eighth Vietnam engaging Vietnam conference and you've held it in Australia in various parts of the United States as well as various parts of Vietnam and and it's really interesting because yeah as Liam you were saying like we were you know Vietnam was very closed before 86 and then gradually opened after Doi Moi and I remember when I first went it was in 1991 it was still like the end of the Soviet era and there were still like you still got Soviet water right and there were still people trying to return to the former Soviet republics but Vietnam studies has evolved so much right since then at that point we really especially in western countries or or non-communist block countries didn't have a lot of contact and exchange so so can you tell us a little bit about like yeah Vietnam studies has evolved where we are today and yeah I mean so that reminds me we we had this conference in at the East West center when a few years ago in 2012 yeah so actually it's at UH this time not at the East West center but we that's fine that that was mentioned earlier because it was held at the East West center before and I remember at that time one person at the East West center saying to us why are you calling this engaging with Vietnam we've been engaging with Vietnam for years now and in actuality yeah the name you could understand in a different ways but we're not trying to engage with a place that no one has engaged in but it's just using Vietnam as a way to you know as a kind of a topic to engage in a lot of different ideas and discussions in different fields from education to the arts to political science to history because really at this point the world of Vietnamese studies has developed so much over the past 20 years and it's you know a very vibrant field that is now you know led not only whereas before maybe there was a lot of foreigners who were the main people in the field now there is people from Vietnam there's you know descendants people who emigrated from Vietnam after the war whose children have now have PhDs and are you know leading scholars in the field so it's a very diverse and developed field by this point yeah and actually you know starting 2009 when I was in Melbourne Australia I realized that I don't know much about Vietnam as soon as I had more contacts with the Vietnam study world of scholarship and then I realized that you know oh come on I can no longer take for granted that I know Vietnam because I am from Vietnam or I am Vietnamese so ignorance was really one of the very important element in why I started the Engaging Good Vietnam initiative so I must say that yeah so ignorance it plays a role yeah yeah and I like to acknowledge that yeah Le Ha is the founder of the Engaging with Vietnam conference series which has been yeah like I said it's a very unique approach to to engaging not just academics but policymakers and other professionals working in in organizations concerned with Vietnam or in Vietnam so how did you conceive of of this conference I mean typically the the the subtitle is an interdisciplinary dialogue yes yeah so you know actually yeah I've mentioned before like ignorant play a role but also I you know because I've done a lot of work with the internationalization and globalization of high education and seeing the instant movement of people particularly you know Vietnamese graduate students around the world and also and then suddenly I realized that no actually Vietnam must be approached from more or less like a global perspective rather than just as a place stuck in its own geographical kind of space so and then and I I do a lot of work with education or in the field of education but I also realized that talking about Vietnam for example from education alone doesn't seem to do justice for a lot of the knowledge and scholarship and also for for developing a more complex and sophisticated understanding of Vietnam and a scholarship on Vietnam produced by so many scholars and graduate students everywhere and at and those days when I was in Melbourne I also observed that a lot of the work produced on Vietnam actually was so different from what I had learned in Vietnam about Vietnam and so that challenged me that questioned me and then I said hey actually Vietnam is so fascinating a lot more fascinating than what I had known about it so I think maybe based on some of those things I kind of gradually developed the engagement with Vietnam bringing different disciplines together I think I think one way to look at it is you know if we put it again in this picture of Doi Moe and the changes in the 90s and the 2000s you were really kind of in the first wave or even before the first wave of Vietnamese students to start going overseas right and to get a PhD yeah and you know what happened is that I think and we still see this is a lot of like Vietnamese students will go to a program somewhere where there won't be an expert on Vietnam at that university and then their received knowledge about Vietnam is just taken for granted they're from Vietnam they must know about Vietnam but then when you know when people who say study about Vietnam read what they write they go no no you can't say these things and so I think they have became aware of this and you know said wait we can't just I can't take my knowledge for granted I have to engage with what other people have said about Vietnam and you know and work out some kind of agreement or kind of you know try to improve you know what we have going okay well very interesting we've got to take a short break right now so I'm Grace Chang here at Global Connections on the Think Tech Think Tech live streaming network series and we're talking with Professor Phan Le Ha and Professor Liam Kelly both from the University of Hawaii on the upcoming conference on Engaging with Vietnam so we'll be back in a minute so please stay tuned for more of this story welcome to ThinkCatHawaii.com this is Johnson Choi I'm the host for the weekly Thursday 11 August show creation review see you next month hi my name is Justini Spiritu this is my co-host Matthew Johnson every Thursday at 4 p.m we host the Hawaii Food and Farmers series this is the place you can come to for insight on the perspective and history and passions of Hawaii's farmers and all folks involved in Hawaii's local food system what kind of folks do we have on so we have everyone from local farmers we have foodies chefs we also have journalists researchers anyone who's actually working to help make Hawaii's local food system that much better so join us every Thursday and tweet in us and ask us some questions and leave your comments as well thank you hello welcome back to Global Connections I'm the host Grace Chang here with Professor Phan Le Ha and Professor Liam Kelly of the University of Hawaii talking about the upcoming conference on engaging with Vietnam okay please I'll take it back here with our discussion about the globalization of higher education and how Vietnamese studies has been benefiting from that has grown from that I know both of you are interested in higher education the changes in like the nature of you know how how we're exchanging and producing knowledge and especially this this conference on engaging Vietnam brings together so many different scholars as well as professionals from different fields so you want to talk a little bit more about like the impact of of internationalizing higher education on on this field yeah I think you might want yeah I mean it's just amazing how much has changed I mean as you will remember I mean if you were in Vietnam in 91 I first went in 1996 we were the only Westerners walking down the street and we were walking down the street a lot of times basically no one knew English or very few people only a small group and so basically we became a kind of bridge between the outside world and and Vietnam if you go down the street in Vietnam today tons of people know English people are sending their kids to starting elementary school overseas they're going to universities and it's just completely transformed how people see the world and I think what they see as important that they need to know I mean for us a lot of the world was a mystery that we were trying to just learn about for a kid growing up in Vietnam today the world's not very mysterious it's on their iPhone they've traveled to many countries you know by the time they're teenagers where I don't think I'd even left my home state by that point and so you know the purpose of what we grew up learning to do which was to learn about another part of the world and be the kind of experts on that it's really that's I think being called into question when you have all these people from around the world who are also engaging in producing knowledge although as we've just said they're not necessarily experts on it simply because they came from that place so it's now we've got this world where our specialized say area studies knowledge of the past doesn't really make sense anymore but it's still important because you know other people don't necessarily have that same knowledge but we have to find a way to bring these people together and and get them to exchange their ideas and learn from each other yeah and at the same time with the increasing introduction of English medium education in Asia in general and in Vietnam in particular we can see you know different ways in which so-called knowledge on Vietnam has been produced from within right from within Vietnam from within Asia and and and at the same time I've also been according to my research I've seen you know a very interesting phenomenon that is the desirability of the idea of the West has been entertained and sustained a lot in the internationalization of higher education in Asia and of course in Vietnam is not you know of course is in the picture too and and so yeah all those phenomena and you know and processes really I think work together to inform how knowledge on Vietnam has been created and so with the engaging with Vietnam conference series we try to engage with all these complex aspects you know not just Vietnamese inside Vietnam but many Vietnamese now studying in Asia let's let's say in Thailand in Singapore and Malaysia in Korea you know they also talk about Vietnam but from the very location they are located and so in what way that is different or or similar to how we for example located in Hawaii look at Vietnam from that afar so I don't know it's kind of exciting to me to to have the opportunity to observe all and actually I mean one of the great things about this concert this concert this conference is that it for some reason or other it has created this niche where it brings out attracts a lot of young majority Vietnamese but also just young people who are you know getting PhDs like at the moment but a lot of young Vietnamese were studying overseas and it brings them together with established scholars which is interesting but what's been particularly interesting is to see who these young people are and it's been kind of changing I mean at first it was what you might expect young Vietnamese studying in Australia the United States France but in the last conference for instance I remember there were like someone who had gone to an English language program in Korea and now was going to go to the United States there's others yeah and it's so it's you really see this global world where people are just are kind of finding their own paths that they're figuring out themselves it's not just oh I need to get a scholarship to go to America or it's well I can go to this one first I can go to Taiwan in this English language program and then get a PhD in Singapore or maybe I'll go to Norway or I'll go to it's all kinds of things are happening so we'll come together which but that then creates challenges for places like American universities which you know have this sort of set way of doing things we send people to Asia we bring people here from Asia well people are doing these very kind of you know following these winding paths that take them to all kinds of places and how do you then link into this you know diverse world now is an interesting question yeah so and that's quite one concept that Liam and I have been very interested in is the concept of journey of knowledge so we look at all these participants various journeys of knowledge production related to Vietnam yeah so yeah so again like yeah so maybe in the 90s or up until the 2000 you could see someone like myself as being quite typical of the first wave of international students from Vietnam you know after the new but now young Vietnamese started going overseas at a very young age or they can already start English medium education right inside Vietnam you know at the age of four or five years old and so that obviously affects and shapes how how or what they know about Vietnam yeah right so and I know you you've both written and we've talked about like knowledge production right like Liam was mentioning this like how we used to study Vietnam or Asia and then the idea that like knowledge production is very different today than when you know we were kids or starting in higher education because yeah there is so much no mobility so I think you made you had mentioned this word um in something you wrote knowledge mobility right and I think that's one of the interesting things about this engaging with Vietnam conference is that it it moves from place to place yes and all these places where we we see some significant interest in Vietnam studies and you know how does higher how does how does Asian studies or the study of different areas that we you know in in the United States like we've typically as Liam you said approached in a certain way where we feel that you know here we have the knowledge base and we bring people over and we send people Americans over there how has that changed that that's definitely been a recent shift in that well I mean I think this is the thing we're struggling with right now is that obviously things have changed and in many ways universities I think aren't really adapting well to this or haven't figured out how to adapt well with this with this conference we can see what's out there but how do you actually change institutionally to find a way to bend to not even benefit but survive with this is still I mean a huge challenge so yes it's fantastic that we can move this conference from one place to another but then how does a single university say benefit from that because obviously you know if everything is sort of in some kind of virtual space somewhere well how do how does a university survive or what is its place there and so I think there's this challenge that we have now in that in many ways knowledge production the way people interact is between institutions but institutions have to survive somehow so how do we actually do that and that's you know no yeah actually I see it a different challenge I would say maybe some I was a contradiction here so on the one hand knowledge about Vietnam on Vietnam has been very global I think so but at the same time institutional approaches to area studies seems to get stuck in the dichotomized you know understandings of so called the west and the rest of Vietnam in this case so how can you bring the two seemingly very different processes together the global approach and the dichotomized approach together so I think that is a real challenge now yeah so yeah can you tell us a bit of more about what we might see at this conference that's coming up in October I know you have you mentioned concert and there are performances beyond the speakers and the topics you'll be addressing yeah so I think it was about a year ago we were in Vietnam and some artists reached out to us who are interested in collaborating with academics and that got us thinking and then we decided to for the theme of this conference to focus on engaging with Vietnam through scholarship and the arts immediately after we sent out the proposal people wrote in and said wait but I'm not an artist can I still participate and we're like yes yes there's ways to do it and we got really scared that maybe no one would submit papers but we got this outpouring of people we had never heard of who are doing stuff in ethnomusicology and film in music but with academic sides to it and so yeah it's just really interesting so the conference this time there there is some parts of it that are still not necessarily directly related to the arts there's going to be some you know historical and stuff in education and things like that but there is going to be a focus on the connection between the arts and scholarship and scholarship and there's going to be a concert I'll let you talk about that yes and so I think we're very ambitious we try to have three sets of performances before during and after the conference and you know in which we particularly highlight a very young and talented musician from Vietnam who's currently based in the Netherlands yeah so I mean let me keep a little bit of secret about that so that we really hope that you know people from the community will come and appreciate his talent yeah we met him this summer and he played for us and it's he is amazing he's incredibly talented yeah yes so you know just just a heads up so we wouldn't have a concert you know tentatively called yeah the music Vietnamese music yeah with Ngô Hồng Quang on the 6th of October the conference will be the 6th and the 7th and the concert on the evening of the 6th yeah yeah very exciting okay well I really look forward to that and thank you both very much for coming on the show I think that if we can look forward to more of these coming up back in Hawaii someday again after this year I know it probably move around but very excited to hear from you too and talking about engaging with Vietnam Vietnam studies internationalizing higher education to hear about all of the different exchanges and also the dynamism of you know all the different young young people in Vietnam who are contributing to the study of Vietnam I think that's really exciting so thank you for joining us today I'm your host Grace Chang and you can find me here every Thursday at one o'clock on Global Connection so see you all next time hello