Foreign and Vietnamese lecturers and postgraduates will conduct research about landslides, river pollution, climate-change adaptation, transnational marriages and Khmer migration as part of the Summer School & Field Trip 2019 from March 18-31 in the Mekong Delta.

HCM City Open University on Monday kicks off the Summer School & Field-trip 2019 which ends on March 31. 

Seven field sites in Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho, Binh Duong, Tra Vinh, Dong Thap and Soc Trang will offer practice in trans-disciplinary approaches that could help participants’ research and teaching careers.

The foreign and Vietnamese lecturers and postgraduates are from universities in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Thailand, and Vietnam.

It is addressing new challenges in a rapidly changing world through dynamic knowledge networks of multi-lateral and trans-disciplinary studies (KNOTS).

KNOTS is funded by European Union’s Erasmus  programme, which supports activities in the fields of education, training, youth and sport.

Social inequality, climate change and migration are topics that will be addressed with collaboration between the higher education sector and non-academic actors.

The negative changes in the Mekong Delta region have accelerated the migration process over the past decades.

More and more residents have migrated to industrial centres such as HCM City and Binh Duong province to live and work. This has led to social inequality and environmental problems.

Participants in the summer camp will address specific problems and solutions related to environment, inequality, and migration and share their findings and stories from the field sites.

Anja Shu Wen Tran of the University of Bonn in Germany said that she expects to learn more societal inequality after the field trips.

Nguyen Minh Ha, Vice Rector of HCM City Open University, a consortium member of KNOTS, said the Summer School and Fieldtrip 2019 will build a stronger network of trans-disciplinary studies.

Petra Dannecker of University of Vienna said: “The project aims to develop transdisciplinary research and teaching which can enrich existing scientific programmes of teaching and research on these issues in the participating Higher Education Institutes and by exploiting, pooling and complementing existing expertise with regard to these highly relevant themes.”-VNS