Introduction: challenging transformations for Vietnam

The social experience of every nation has particular themes and foci, attracting the attention and deliberation of scholars, public and media. These are areas of interest for commentary and conflict, often most pressing where they are recognised as challenges, at the sharp end of discussion, mattering often beyond their specificity. The scholars who wrote the papers gathered here want to make a critical, informed, evaluation of the circumstances facing Vietnam today. This collection addresses issues for Vietnam where contemporary challenges are transforming social life, impacted by both long-term and short-term factors. The longer term factor is primarily the socio-economic demographic expansion of the middle-class and their concerns, more immediate impacts include how the aftermath of COVID-19 has compelled new forms of action in various sectors, from governance and education to heritage and tourism. Some of the more significant changes include new takes on topics like migration or workplace, but some grapple with new technologies and the reformatting of socio-cultural forms, for example how workplace activity and unionism are transformed by mobile telephony.

The papers were originally presented, in much briefer form, at the International Conference on Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities (ISSH 2021), 16 and 17 December 2021, at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The talks from the conference were subsequently and substantially reworked around the theme of social challenges. Of course, the scope of all possible challenges for any one country cannot be comprehensively covered, even by the best. We do not discuss aspects of agriculture, industry, urbanisation or tourism as much as we would like (and will do in future work). We know interaction between challenges is also a factor, addressing some of this in what follows, but not yet with a comparative theory that could ask how every possible challenge, indeed all possible threats, might be anticipated? Knowing we cannot predict the future, we want nevertheless to learn and be prepared for what will come. We cannot, as well, cover each and every past challenge faced by Vietnam, though we go into some in depth, others are only implied, yet our idea of social challenges both retrospective and looking forward is made very much in awareness of the present. Necessarily, we take the critical challenge of specific areas—class, the family, women, migration—as implying varied tactical and strategic responses and lessons that any nation must face to move forward.

The first article, by Nguyen Thi Thu Trang, of Ton Duc Thang University, takes up the context of the growing middle-class in Ho Chi Minh City, with significant concerns identified among this class regarding where to maintain investment, i.e. in education opportunities for their children. The second essay, by Nguyen Huu Minh of the Vietnam Sociological Association, addresses the role of the family as the preeminent unit of social life for the vast majority of Vietnamese. With continued relevance, Vietnamese families of course also face challenges. At the same time, an urgent need to reconcile differences without compromising what is unique and important to Vietnamese communities, especially concerning outcomes for women is the focus of the article by Pham Thi Ha Thuong, Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ton Duc Thang University. Then, with attention to the impact of technologies on working lives, Le Thi Mai addresses the transformations that new forms of telephony in the workforce entail in terms of dialogue between employees and employers. The digital here is a metaphor for recoding the cultures of work and the general social space of Vietnam, all transformed in the face of contemporary challenges. The paper by Nguyen Nu Nguyet Anh, of University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City and Cao Thanh Tam, of National Chinan University, Taiwan, presents an important assessment of the predicament of migrants returning to Vietnam from Cambodia after facing, sometimes still not resolved, problems with documentation and livelihood.

The visual essay in this volume develops research on images invoking memory and re-memory, the challenge of moving forward from difficult, still present, yet changing pasts.

There then follow a series of essays on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam. As a counterpoint detail of the story of well-to-do middle-classes in section one, Dang Thi Kim Phung focuses, with her Vietnam Airlines staff co-author, Luong Thuy Ngan, on a less positive aspect of middle-class experience. Without making it a sensation, as the media sometimes did during the first year of the pandemic, “airline people” found it stressful to be a part of the frontline of varied impacts under COVID-19, indeed sometimes in ways that brought confusion to workers under duress. In the next article, the importance of training in social work and the disruptions entailed in the period of the pandemic are addressed. Nguyen Thi Do Quyen and Nguyen Thi Phuong Linh offer an analysis of how social work placement programmes faced such disruption. The difficulties that required lecturers and students to adjust their roles and expectations were of course not unique. In the next essay, the impact upon knowledge workers in a university library is closely studied by Le Hue Huong of the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City and Bui Loan Thuy of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City. The experience of these library staff during the lockdown phases of the pandemic was taxing and stressful and could sometimes be controversial. Finally, the tourism industry was among the most visibly impacted in Vietnam as elsewhere, yet the repercussions of COVID-19 allow us to consider an aspect of tourism where we see a move towards resilience in the innovation of “staycation” development in the industry. In their paper, Hung Nguyen Phuc, of Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry, and Huan Minh Nguyen, working in tourism studies at Ton Duc Thang University, offer a detailed quantitative and qualitative survey of Vietnam’s Staycation experience during the COVID-19 pandemic which anticipates a slow recovery of the industry.

These papers take their place in print after first being talked at ISSH 2021, which was our second international conference under the theme of Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Planning for a third conference is underway for July 2024, but both the first and the second events left their mark in publications, including two previous sets of articles on South Asian themes in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

Notably, as everybody who was at the conference in person or online surely remembers, December 2021 in Vietnam was a time when Covid-19 restrictions were still in place. The conference was held mostly online. Perhaps we would have to call this one “semi-hybrid,” as the dedicated staff of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities ran the sessions out of 4 wired conference rooms at the university. The team, with the support of Ton Duc Thang University’s President Dr. Tran Trong Dao, delivered a successful event with more than 70 papers and over 400 online guests over the two days. In adverse conditions then, this was a significant achievement and as co-chairs of the conference we want to commend all the faculty staff who gathered in those rooms to make the event possible. We also take this opportunity to proudly present the best of the Vietnamese papers in this issue.

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Notes on contributors

John HUTNYK

John Hutnyk is the author of 5 single-author books, including The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation (Zed 1996; re-released 2023 in India by Bloomsbury), and Global South Asia on Screen (Bloomsbury UK 2018 and Aakar India 2019).

Huu Minh NGUYEN

Nguyen Huu Minh is the President of Vietnam Sociological Association. His publications include (as author or co-author): Vietnamese Marriage Patterns in the Red River Delta: Tradition and Change (2009), Estimating the Costs of Domestic Violence Against Women in Viet Nam (2012), Gia đình Việt Nam trong quá trình công nghiệp hóa, hiện đại hóa và hội nhập quốc tế từ cách tiếp cận so sánh [Vietnamese Family in the Context of Industrialisation, Modernisation and Integration from Comparative Approaches] (2014), and Hôn nhân trong xã hội Việt Nam đương đại [Marriage in Contemporary Vietnamese Society] (2016).