Jamie Gillen

Tourism and Nation Building at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Using evidence from what is probably Vietnams most visited tourism site, the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, this article explores the presentation of the “American War” in the construction of nationhood. The article has three objectives. First, I illustrate how nation-building in a postcolonial and postimperial context is generated through tourism, specifying how the Communist Party communicates Vietnam to lay international tourist audiences. Tourisms political instrumentality for the party is highlighted here. Second, I show how the United States is imaginatively constructed to shape Vietnams identity. Finally, I use the conclusion to reflect on the implications for the “Asian Century” when considering Vietnams multifaceted connections to the United States and the West.

Challenging the principles of ecotourism: insights from entrepreneurs on environmental and economic sustainability in Langkawi, Malaysia

ABSTRACT Ecotourism is a normative concept defined and driven by generalized principles concerning local livelihoods and conservation of natural and cultural environments. Supply-side studies considering the applicability of these principles in practice are limited. In particular, an understanding of how entrepreneurialism shapes ecotourism is largely absent from the literature. We investigate the intersection of entrepreneurialism, ecotourism, and governance using a case study of actors at the Kilim Karst Geoforest Park (KKGP) in Langkawi, Malaysia, which has seen a rapid rise in entrepreneurial “ecotourism” activities. However, levels of competition between actors, their perceptions of ecotourism, and the challenges and tensions they face are unknown. To address this, a “hierarchy of entrepreneurship” is presented, grouping actors into three tiers: governing institutions, tour companies, and independent entrepreneurs, from whom qualitative data are elicited. Opinions and contestations between and among tiers are elucidated around themes including how understandings of ecotourism influence entrepreneurial strategies, and how challenges and tensions may inhibit the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of ecotourism at KKGP. The study demonstrates that the normative dogma guiding how ecotourism should be practised must be balanced against the diverse understandings, motivations, and capacities of ecotourism entrepreneurs on the ground and the effectiveness of governance systems.

Bringing the countryside to the city: Practices and imaginations of the rural in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

By zeroing in on the spatial tensions of the urban experience, this paper examines the countryside’s role as a set of everyday practices and imaginative discourses in the growth and transformation of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The argument centres on how urban residents draw on material practices and symbolic discourses of the ‘rural’ to imbue the city with meaning. In doing so, this paper adds another dimension to the literature on Southeast Asian cities by illustrating how Ho Chi Minh City institutions and residents enliven the value of the countryside through urban development. Related to this, I highlight how the folding of the countryside in to the city does not deprive either rural or urban space of meaning. In sum, the findings contribute to debates surrounding the Southeast Asian region in urban theorising, the countryside’s role in linking the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’, and the classic ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors involved in rural–urban migration by rethinking the urban/rural binary in Vietnam.

Map Interpretation Instruction in Introductory Textbooks: A Preliminary Investigation

ABSTRACT Maps are often understood as the primary tool in geography; however, recent research indicates that the number of students taking map interpretation courses has declined. As geography students are expected to master the uses of maps, this study investigates the materials available in introductory collegiate textbooks that promote the development of those skills. Seventeen widely used introductory geography texts are analyzed for the following: the presence of text material dedicated to map interpretation; content related to map interpretation concepts; and additional resources such as study boxes designed to enhance student map interpretation abilities. After taking an inventory of introductory geography textbooks, findings indicate broad inclusion of map interpretation concepts in physical, human, world regional, and general geography textbooks, although physical and general geography textbooks include more substantive map interpretation explanation and tools than their human and world regional counterparts. This study is intended to be useful for instructors evaluating the breadth and depth of map interpretation concepts and tools in introductory textbooks, as well as those looking for specific terms or exercises to use in classroom instruction.

On the spatiality of the academic job market in critical human geography

This essay uses a geographical vocabulary to describe the process of looking for and obtaining academic employment in critical human geography since the onset of the global recession. The first goal of this paper is to document a transformative moment in the history of geography by narrating stories of the job hunt. The second goal of the paper is to map the liminality, precarity, and contradictions of the contemporary job search. The final goal is to reflect on how the academic job search affects our approach to and relationship with the discipline of geography.

The Prospect of Elsewhere: Engaging the Future through Aspirations in Asia

There has been a recent surge of interest in “the future” as a subject and object of analysis in human geography, mostly centered on uncertainty and threats posed by terrorism, transspecies epidemics, and climate change. In contrast, relatively little attention has been given to that ways in which humans engage futurity in their everyday lives and geographies. Although acknowledging some important exceptions, in this article we seek to build specifically on anthropologist Arjun Appadurais call for a more people-centered and “democratic” consideration of future making. What Appadurai terms an “ethics of possibility” is about rescuing the future from the “avalanche of numbers” associated with expert calculation in the realms of science and technology, security and geopolitics, and health and insurance. We argue that human geographers are among the “culturally oriented social scientists” who are equipped for scholarly advancement of an ethics of possibility. Our own geographic contribution emerges from field-based qualitative material collected as part of a wider collaborative research project on aspirations in urban Asia. In the accounts that we present from cities in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, it is the prospect of elsewhere—and of being elsewhere—that nurtures imaginings of aspirational futures and spurs efforts to realize them. In addition to drawing empirical attention to people, places, and regions that do not often feature in Anglophone human geography, our article contributes to geographic conceptualization of how futures are being prospected in cultural imaginaries and through an array of spatial practices.

Fieldwork Unbound: Spaces of Association in Postconflict Vietnam

This article traces the ways in which the field emerges and becomes emplaced among three groups of people by presenting an inclusive reading of fieldwork in postconflict Vietnam. It employs a heuristic device called spaces of association to illustrate the different yet interrelated socio-spatial fields that surface when conducting fieldwork in an environment known for violence. In shedding light on the fields ability to extend beyond the territorially defined “field site,” this article speaks to debates surrounding the socio-spatial production of multiple and overlapping fields, describes the audiences engaged with and implicated in research, and contributes to understandings of ethical research engagement with postconflict field sites.

It begins with the bombs: operationalizing violence at a Vietnamese dark tourism site

This article presents the operationalization of violence in dark tourism through repeated visits to a prominent state-operated tourist site in southern Vietnam called the Cu Chi tunnels complex. I argue that this operationalization occurs because dark tourism plays on the violent performances of the extraordinary and everyday. In making this argument, I encourage both a recuperation of the exceptional aspects of the dark tourism experience and a continued appreciation of dark tourism’s routine characteristics. A performative relationship between the remarkable and the familiar brings the operationalization of violence more closely into conversation with dark tourism in Asia, a field and a region more attuned to memorialization and commemoration than with tourist enactments of violence.

On academic publishing, the myth of the East–West nexus, and tourism scholars in a regime era – a commentary on “The global permutations of the Western publication regime” by Erik Cohen, Scott A. Cohen, and Victor T. King

The article, “The global permutations of the Western publication regime” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2016.1272556), inspires this short commentary. I respond directly to two points made in the original article about academic publishing and divisions between the “East” and “West” and make an additional point about the role of tourism scholars in these debates. My reason for writing this commentary is twofold: to take seriously the publishing regime’s influence in academia around the world and to challenge a universalizing critique of its features.

Urbanizing existential authenticity: Motorbike tourism in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

This article expands on the concept of existential authenticity by considering its scalar dimensions in the Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, “back of the motorbike” tourism industry. This article has three related goals. In the first place, I show that the concept of existential authenticity demands a scalar component because of the term’s focus on the embodied, the emotional, and the interactive. These characteristics lend themselves to thinking about the urban dimensions of existential authenticity. Second, this article responds to calls pushing for empirical work to be conducted on existential authenticity. Lastly and given the possibilities that exist at the intersection of scale and existential authenticity, future research paths are sketched.