Academic literature on the topic 'Vietnamese Intellectual life'

During the years 1954––1958, the Vietnamese Workers' Party, in a series of advances and retreats, asserted control over all forms of intellectual and cultural expression in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This essay looks at how one of Vietnam's greatest poets, Xuâân Diệu (1916––1985), navigated his way through these turbulent years. When the storm finally abated in the latter half of 1958, some of the regime's most important intellectuals found themselves marooned in far-away labor camps with their reputations in ruins and their careers sunk. Not so with Xuâân Diệu——he had been buffeted about in the rough waters but ultimately was able to sail on with his career intact. He fared well in his personal life, too, since the party leadership allowed him to continue sharing an elegant, state-owned French villa with his sister, Ngôô Xuâân Như, and her husband, Huy Cận——Xuâân Diệu's homosexual partner. How did Xuâân Diệu do it?

This paper surveys the emergence and transformation of Vietnamese studies in Russia and the former Soviet Union from the late nineteenth century until the present. It demonstrates how writings by Russian explorers and geographers developed into a professional academic field during the Soviet era, one that was strongly shaped by ideological affinities and international connections within the communist world. Although Vietnamese studies in Russia has retained some intellectual and institutional legacies from the Soviet era, it also reflects transformations in academic life in Russia since the 1990s as well as the changing relationship between the two countries.

Since the day we won power, our Party and State have always considered people as the most precious capital of society: “Vietnamese people are people with comprehensive development, with a harmonious collective and individual life, rich, etc.”. Thus, the goals that need to be achieved by scientific and technical staff in our universities are High intellectual development, physical strength, moral purity, spiritual abundance, and the ability to work and have a positive socio-political character. Therefore, it is necessary to define the goals and tasks of physical education in order to raise the awareness of lecturers and students about the role of the subject; From that identification, this study points out the current difficulties in physical education in Vietnamese universities.

Lack of family engagement in transition planning continues to be a challenge in special education. This study examined the experiences of Chinese and Vietnamese families of youth with disabilities toward transition planning. Results suggested that participants were eager to be engaged in the transition planning and valued the importance of transition planning activities. They wanted to ensure that their youth were equipped with skills, so they could lead a successful and independent adult life. However, schools provided little to no information regarding the transition planning process. This lack of information prevented them from being actively involved. Implications for future research and practice to enhance partnership between schools and diverse families in the development of transition planning are discussed.

Phạm Nguyễn Du’s influential text Humble Comments on the Analects (Luận Ngữ Ngu Án 論語愚按) is an outstanding example of a Vietnamese adaptation and reworking of an East Asian intellectual tradition. In organizing his work, Phạm departed from convention by rearranging the extant chapters of the Analects into four “books”: “Sage” (Thánh 聖), “Learning” (Học 學), “Official” (Sĩ 仕), and “Politics” (Chính 政). Moreover, Phạm placed particular emphasis on the “Learning” book, and thus underscored his contention that the classic text was especially relevant and meaningful to eighteenth-century Vietnam. This paper attempts to read Phạm’s work in the contexts of both Confucian tradition and contemporary education. First, it examines Phạm’s composition of the Humble Comments based on Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning. Phạm’s writing process in this work presents a fascinating case of transformative learning, in which the author questions received assumptions about the world and himself, puts forward new propositions, and elaborates these via an original reading of a classic. Through the analysis of Phạm Nguyễn Du’s life and his preface to the Humble Comments, one can also gain a better view of the Vietnamese reception of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism, and more particularly, of Zhu’s dictum of “learning for the sake of one’s self” (weiji zhi xue 為己 之學). Lastly, this dictum will be reappraised to show its validity in contemporary educational contexts.

In 1937, leading members of the Self-Strength Literary Group [Tự Lực Văn Đoàn], together with a number of Hà Nội’s Western-educated architects and intellectuals, founded the League of Light [Hội Ánh Sáng or Đoàn Ánh Sáng] to combat unsanitary housing. This study traces the league’s brief history, from its inception in December 1936 to its gradual demise sometime in the early 1940s. It argues that the leaders of the League of Light were interested in more than simply improving the living conditions of impoverished Vietnamese; they aspired to carve out a pluralistic public space for civic collective action, where one had barely existed before. For the peasant masses, the league wanted to change how they thought and behaved by manipulating the physical space in which they lived. For educated urban elites, their participation in the organization served to generate modern ideas of community, civic duty, and social responsibility. Through the restructuring and regulation of everyday life, the league’s founders aspired to shape social order through the establishment of a Vietnamese civil society.

During the struggle for national liberation, to seize the power back to the people, from 1930 to 1945, being propagandized and advocated by the Communist Party, a large part of patriotic intellectuals and progressives joined in the people's patriotic movement and revolution, accompanied the nation, significantly contributed to the struggle against colonialism, restored and developed the revolutionary movement, protected the Party, prepared Forces for all aspects of the preparation of the general uprising, contributed to the victory of the August 1945 Revolution and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The Party’s mobilization of intellectuals from 1930 to 1945 brought many of the Party's creations and Ho Chi Minh's ideology to life in building and promoting the precious traditional values of the nation and the power of the bloc of great national unity based on Marxism-Leninism and Vietnamese patriotism.

SCIENCE UNDER FIRE: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America by Andrew Jewett. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 356 pages. Hardcover; $41.00. ISBN: 9780674987913. *John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White's role in fueling popular ideas about conflict between the primarily natural sciences and religion has been often studied. It is now well known that their claims were erroneous, prejudice laden (in Draper's case against Roman Catholicism), and part of broader efforts to align science with a liberal and rationalized Christianity. In Science under Fire, Boston College historian Andrew Jewett recounts a similarly important but lesser-known tale: twentieth-century criticism of the primarily human sciences as promoting politically charged, prejudice laden, and secular accounts of human nature. *Jewett is an intellectual historian who focuses on the interplay between the sciences and public life in the United States. Science under Fire follows up on his 2012 Science, Democracy, and the American University, which explored the role of science (or, more precisely, science-inspired thinking associated with the human sciences) as a shaper of American culture from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. As with that previous work, Science under Fire illustrates how science can be practiced as a form of culture building and leveraged for sociopolitical ends. While Science, Democracy, and the American University explored how various ideas about science came to displace the then-dominant Protestant understandings of morality in the late nineteenth century, Science under Fire considers how a variety of critics reacted to the growing influence of those sciences. *Throughout both historical periods, members of the public, politicians, and many social scientists did not view science as offering a neutral or unbiased account of the nature of humans and their behavior. Rather, they practiced, appropriated, and criticized various accounts in order to advance particular visions about how society should be organized. These visions were not primarily driven by scientific data but by philosophical precommitments, including some which led their proponents to deny the validity of the Protestant and humanist values which previously anchored American public life. So, Science under Fire addresses religious and politically conservative apprehension over "amoral" psychology and the teaching of evolution in schools. However, its story is much broader. The secular and religious liberals and conservatives, libertarians and socialists, humanities scholars and social scientists all at times lamented the dehumanizing effects of technology or worried that scientists were unduly influenced by selfish motives. *Science under Fire begins with a twenty-three-page summary of the book's main themes. This is followed by two chapters that explain the cultural developments which fostered apprehension about science's role in society. By the 1920s, some thinkers were calling on Americans to adopt "modern" scientific modes of thought, in part by dismissing religion as a source of objective values (chap. 1). Their efforts were resisted by humanities scholars, Catholics, and liberal Protestants, who focused on lambasting naturalist approaches in psychology (e.g., by Freud and John Watson) as pseudoscientific and offering classical or religious values as a bulwark against the excesses of capitalism and consumerism (chap. 2). *In the 1930s and 40s, these critiques were given new impetus as worries arose over social scientists' role in shaping Roosevelt's New Deal as well as mental associations between amoral science and Japanese and German totalitarianism (chap. 3). Post-World War II fears over science grew to encompass concerns about "amoral" scientists such as B. F. Skinner, Benjamin Spock, and others engaging in "social engineering" by training children to value social conformity at the expense of traditional religious or humanist moral guidance (chap. 4). The increasingly vehement religious opposition to scientists' attempts to address questions of morality was partly driven by opposition to "atheist" communism and featured a broad coalition of Protestant and Catholic critics decrying the effects of "scientism" (chap. 5). *There was also a postwar resurgence in interest in the humanities, as well as efforts by thinkers such as C. P. Snow, to position the social sciences as a humanist bridge between "literary" and "scientific" cultures (chap. 6). In the United States, Snow's call for greater prominence for the sciences was challenged by New Right conservatives, who regarded it as dangerously opening the door for liberal academic social scientists to portray their ideologically charged views as objectively scientific. Their efforts included supporting conservative social scientists' research, intervening in academic politics and research funding, and, somewhat 'justifiably, 'complaining about the persecution of conservative scholars (chap. 7). *Nevertheless, postwar criticism of scientism was couched in flexible enough terms to appeal to politically and theologically diverse thinkers associated with various institutes and literary endeavors (chap. 8), ultimately including many in the iconoclastic New Left counterculture of the 1960s and 70s (chap. 9). By that time, movements critical of science included religious opposition to evolution and psychology; neoconservative criticism of the "welfare state"; and feminist, Black, and indigenous critiques of science as a tool for justifying an oppressive status quo (chap. 10). *In the Reaganite era, science was targeted by pluralist, postfoundationalist, poststructuralist, and postmodern thinkers; religious conservative challenges to evolution and "secularism" in science; tighter budgets and a downgrading of blue-sky research; and worries over the implications of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering (chap. 11). After a short evaluative conclusion, sixty-two pages of endnotes help flesh out Jewett's argument. *Science under Fire helps illuminate how science and religion have interacted as culture-shaping forces in American public life. Readers will learn how debates that are prima facie about science and religion are really about values and cultural authority, and will discover the origins of some of the assumptions and strategic moves that shape popular science-faith discourse. They will also be invited to enlarge their repertoire of science-faith thinkers (e.g., John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, B. F. Skinner) and topics (behaviorism, debates over Keynesian economics as a backdrop, and how science's value-free ideal was invented and leveraged). *Nevertheless, readers should be aware that Jewett's near-exclusive focus on sweeping intellectual tendencies and the social sciences (with occasional forays to reflect on genetic technology and the atomic bomb) means that Science under Fire is not an entirely balanced account of science, politics, and religion in America. Some chapters focus on major streams of thought to the point that the story of individual movements, thinkers, and their interactions with one another is lost. Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical reactions to scientism are treated relatively perfunctorily compared to liberal Christian responses (e.g., the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science is mentioned while the American Scientific Affiliation is not). A bias toward sociological explanations occasionally leads to a degree of mischaracterization. For example, Thomas Kuhn is mentioned only in connection with the 1960s counterculture, and the Vietnam-era Strategic Hamlet Program is characterized as an attempt to "make proper citizens out of Vietnamese peasants" rooted in modernization theory (p. 181), without mentioning it as a counterinsurgency strategy inspired by Britain's successful use of "New Villages" in the Malayan emergency. Finally, although most of the book is lucid, it is occasionally meandering, repetitive, and convoluted. This is particularly true for the introduction, which readers might consider skipping on the first read. *These criticisms are not meant to be dismissive. Science under Fire is a unique and uniquely important book. Those who are willing to mine its depths will be rewarded with a treasure trove of insight into the social and political factors that continue to shape conversations about science, technology, and faith in the United States today. *Reviewed by Stephen Contakes, Associate Professor of Chemistry, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA 93108.

After Trần Dần criticized the poetry collection of Tỗ Hữu, a politician—calling his magnum opus a manual collection of propaganda and leadership—Tỗ Hữu assembled 150 poets and party intellectuals to criticize the poet, declaring Trần Dần and likeminded writers guilty of petty bourgeoisie. In February 1956, Trần Dần was purged from the party and sent to the infamous Hanoi Prison. Though he was released after an attempted suicide, Trần Dần was suspended from the Union of Arts and Literature for the next thirty years. In other words, for most of the poet's life, his works never saw the light of day. In August 2018, I was sitting in a cafe in Saigon sipping coffee when a novel caught my eyes: Crossroads and Lampposts it read—after a few lines I was mesmerized. I had seldom seen Vietnamese used in such a creative thought-provoking and frankly rule-breaking way. I searched up the author’s name and incredulously realized that instead of an emerging avant-garde writer, I was looking at the wikipedia entry for a 20th century radical who produced the draft fifty years before it was published. What followed was an obsessive pursuit of the elusive author's only poetry collection that led me from bookstore to bookstore across town without success. I afterwards realized that I could not find any copies because it had gone out of print long ago. Though the state had officially given Trần Dần pardon, their relationship with his poetry is still a precarious one. Fortunately, I was able to contact an Australian expatriate in Hanoi, the translator of Crossroads and Lampposts who had an electronic copy of the poetry collection that he shared with me.

In 1988, historian Nadia Wheatley and indigenous artist Donna Rawlins published their award-winning picture book, My Place, a reinterpretation of Australian national identity and sovereignty prompted by the bicentennial of white settlement. Twenty years later, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) commissioned Penny Chapman’s multi-platform project based on this book. The 13 episodes of the television series begin in 2008, each telling the story of a child at a different point in history, and are accompanied by substantial interactive online content. Issues as diverse as religious difference and immigration, wartime conscription and trauma, and the experiences of Aboriginal Australians are canvassed. The program itself, which has a second series currently in production, introduces child audiences to—and implicates them in—a rich ideological fabric of deeply politicised issues that directly engage with vexed questions of Australian nationhood. The series offers a subversive view of Australian history and society, and it is the child—whether protagonist on the screen or the viewer/user of the content—who is left to discover, negotiate and move beyond often problematic societal norms. As one of the public broadcaster’s keystone projects, My Place signifies important developments in ABC’s construction of multicultural child citizenship. The digitisation of Australian television has facilitated a wave of multi-channel and new media innovation. Though the development of a multi-channel ecology has occurred significantly later in Australia than in the US or Europe, in part due to genre restrictions on broadcasters, all major Australian networks now have at least one additional free-to-air channel, make some of their content available online, and utilise various forms of social media to engage their audiences. The ABC has been in the vanguard of new media innovation, leveraging the industry dominance of ABC Online and its cross-platform radio networks for the repurposing of news, together with the additional funding for digital renewal, new Australian content, and a digital children’s channel in the 2006 and 2009 federal budgets. In line with “market failure” models of broadcasting (Born, Debrett), the ABC was once the most important producer-broadcaster for child viewers. With the recent allocation for the establishment of ABC3, it is now the catalyst for a significant revitalisation of the Australian children’s television industry. The ABC Charter requires it to broadcast programs that “contribute to a sense of national identity” and that “reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community” (ABC Documents). Through its digital children’s channel (ABC3) and its multi-platform content, child viewers are not only exposed to a much more diverse range of local content, but also politicised by an intricate network of online texts connected to the TV programs. The representation of diasporic communities through and within multi-platformed spaces forms a crucial part of the way(s) in which collective identities are now being negotiated in children’s texts. An analysis of one of the ABC’s My Place “projects” and its associated multi-platformed content reveals an intricate relationship between postcolonial concerns and the construction of child citizenship. Multicultural Places, Multi-Platformed Spaces: New Media Innovation at the ABC The 2007 restructure at the ABC has transformed commissioning practices along the lines noted by James Bennett and Niki Strange of the BBC—a shift of focus from “programs” to multi-platform “projects,” with the latter consisting of a complex network of textual production. These “second shift media practices” (Caldwell) involve the tactical management of “user flows structured into and across the textual terrain that serve to promote a multifaceted and prolonged experience of the project” (Bennett and Strange 115). ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s polemic deployment of the “digital commons” trope (Murdock, From) differs from that of his opposite number at the BBC, Mark Thompson, in its emphasis on the glocalised openness of the Australian “town square”—at once distinct from, and an integral part of, larger conversations. As announced at the beginning of the ABC’s 2009 annual report, the ABC is redefining the town square as a world of greater opportunities: a world where Australians can engage with one another and explore the ideas and events that are shaping our communities, our nation and beyond … where people can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from each other. (ABC ii)The broad emphasis on engagement characterises ABC3’s positioning of children in multi-platformed projects. As the Executive Producer of the ABC’s Children’s Television Multi-platform division comments, “participation is very much the mantra of the new channel” (Glen). The concept of “participation” is integral to what has been described elsewhere as “rehearsals in citizenship” (Northam). Writing of contemporary youth, David Buckingham notes that “‘political thinking’ is not merely an intellectual or developmental achievement, but an interpersonal process which is part of the construction of a collective, social identity” (179). Recent domestically produced children’s programs and their associated multimedia applications have significant potential to contribute to this interpersonal, “participatory” process. Through multi-platform experiences, children are (apparently) invited to construct narratives of their own. Dan Harries coined the term “viewser” to highlight the tension between watching and interacting, and the increased sense of agency on the part of audiences (171–82). Various online texts hosted by the ABC offer engagement with extra content relating to programs, with themed websites serving as “branches” of the overarching ABC3 metasite. The main site—strongly branded as the place for its targeted demographic—combines conventional television guide/program details with “Watch Now!,” a customised iView application within ABC3’s own themed interface; youth-oriented news; online gaming; and avenues for viewsers to create digital art and video, or interact with the community of “Club3” and associated message boards. The profiles created by members of Club3 are moderated and proscribe any personal information, resulting in an (understandably) restricted form of “networked publics” (boyd 124–5). Viewser profiles comprise only a username (which, the website stresses, should not be one’s real name) and an “avatar” (a customisable animated face). As in other social media sites, comments posted are accompanied by the viewser’s “name” and “face,” reinforcing the notion of individuality within the common group. The tool allows users to choose from various skin colours, emphasising the multicultural nature of the ABC3 community. Other customisable elements, including the ability to choose between dozens of pre-designed ABC3 assets and feeds, stress the audience’s “ownership” of the site. The Help instructions for the Club3 site stress the notion of “participation” directly: “Here at ABC3, we don’t want to tell you what your site should look like! We think that you should be able to choose for yourself.” Multi-platformed texts also provide viewsers with opportunities to interact with many of the characters (human actors and animated) from the television texts and share further aspects of their lives and fictional worlds. One example, linked to the representation of diasporic communities, is the Abatti Pizza Game, in which the player must “save the day” by battling obstacles to fulfil a pizza order. The game’s prefacing directions makes clear the ethnicity of the Abatti family, who are also visually distinctive. The dialogue also registers cultural markers: “Poor Nona, whatsa she gonna do? Now it’s up to you to help Johnny and his friends make four pizzas.” The game was acquired from the Canadian-animated franchise, Angela Anaconda; nonetheless, the Abatti family, the pizza store they operate and the dilemma they face translates easily to the Australian context. Dramatisations of diasporic contributions to national youth identities in postcolonial or settler societies—the UK (My Life as a Popat, CITV) and Canada (How to Be Indie)—also contribute to the diversity of ABC3’s television offerings and the positioning of its multi-platform community. The negotiation of diasporic and postcolonial politics is even clearer in the public broadcaster’s commitment to My Place. The project’s multifaceted construction of “places,” the ethical positioning of the child both as an individual and a member of (multicultural) communities, and the significant acknowledgement of ongoing conflict and discrimination, articulate a cultural commons that is more open-ended and challenging than the Eurocentric metaphor, the “town square,” suggests. Diversity, Discrimination and Diasporas: Positioning the Viewser of My Place Throughout the first series of My Place, the experiences of children within different diasporic communities are the focal point of five of the initial six episodes, the plots of which revolve around children with Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek, and Irish backgrounds. This article focuses on an early episode of the series, “1988,” which explicitly confronts the cultural frictions between dominant Anglocentric Australian and diasporic communities. “1988” centres on the reaction of young Lily to the arrival of her cousin, Phuong, from Vietnam. Lily is a member of a diasporic community, but one who strongly identifies as “an Australian,” allowing a nuanced exploration of the ideological conflicts surrounding the issue of so-called “boat people.” The protagonist’s voice-over narration at the beginning of the episode foregrounds her desire to win Australia’s first Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, thus mobilising nationally identified hierarchies of value. Tensions between diasporic and settler cultures are frequently depicted. One potentially reactionary sequence portrays the recurring character of Michaelis complaining about having to use chopsticks in the Vietnamese restaurant; however, this comment is contextualised several episodes later, when a much younger Michaelis, as protagonist of the episode “1958,” is himself discriminated against, due to his Greek background. The political irony of “1988” pivots on Lily’s assumption that her cousin “won’t know Australian.” There is a patronising tone in her warning to Phuong not to speak Vietnamese for fear of schoolyard bullying: “The kids at school give you heaps if you talk funny. But it’s okay, I can talk for you!” This encourages child viewers to distance themselves from this fictional parallel to the frequent absence of representation of asylum seekers in contemporary debates. Lily’s assumptions and attitudes are treated with a degree of scepticism, particularly when she assures her friends that the silent Phuong will “get normal soon,” before objectifying her cousin for classroom “show and tell.” A close-up camera shot settles on Phuong’s unease while the children around her gossip about her status as a “boat person,” further encouraging the audience to empathise with the bullied character. However, Phuong turns the tables on those around her when she reveals she can competently speak English, is able to perform gymnastics and other feats beyond Lily’s ability, and even invents a story of being attacked by “pirates” in order to silence her gossiping peers. By the end of the narrative, Lily has redeemed herself and shares a close friendship with Phuong. My Place’s structured child “participation” plays a key role in developing the postcolonial perspective required by this episode and the project more broadly. Indeed, despite the record project budget, a second series was commissioned, at least partly on the basis of the overwhelmingly positive reception of viewsers on the ABC website forums (Buckland). The intricate My Place website, accessible through the ABC3 metasite, generates transmedia intertextuality interlocking with, and extending the diegesis of, the televised texts. A hyperlinked timeline leads to collections of personal artefacts “owned” by each protagonist, such as journals, toys, and clothing. Clicking on a gold medal marked “History” in Lily’s collection activates scrolling text describing the political acceptance of the phrase “multiculturalism” and the “Family Reunion” policy, which assisted the arrival of 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants. The viewser is reminded that some people were “not very welcoming” of diasporic groups via an explicit reference to Mrs Benson’s discriminatory attitudes in the series. Viewsers can “visit” virtual representations of the program’s sets. In the bedroom, kitchen, living room and/or backyard of each protagonist can be discovered familiar and additional details of the characters’ lives. The artefacts that can be “played” with in the multimedia applications often imply the enthusiastic (and apparently desirable) adoption of “Australianness” by immigrant children. Lily’s toys (her doll, hair accessories, roller skates, and glass marbles) invoke various aspects of western children’s culture, while her “journal entry” about Phuong states that she is “new to Australia but with her sense of humour she has fitted in really well.” At the same time, the interactive elements within Lily’s kitchen, including a bowl of rice and other Asian food ingredients, emphasise cultural continuity. The description of incense in another room of Lily’s house as a “common link” that is “used in many different cultures and religions for similar purposes” clearly normalises a glocalised world-view. Artefacts inside the restaurant operated by Lily’s mother link to information ranging from the ingredients and (flexible) instructions for how to make rice paper rolls (“Lily and Phuong used these fillings but you can use whatever you like!”) to a brief interactive puzzle game requiring the arrangement of several peppers in order from least hot to most hot. A selectable picture frame downloads a text box labelled “Images of Home.” Combined with a slideshow of static, hand-drawn images of traditional Vietnamese life, the text can be read as symbolic of the multiplicity of My Place’s target audience(s): “These images would have reminded the family of their homeland and also given restaurant customers a sense of Vietnamese culture.” The social-developmental, postcolonial agenda of My Place is registered in both “conventional” ancillary texts, such as the series’ “making of” publication (Wheatley), and the elaborate pedagogical website for teachers developed by the ACTF and Educational Services Australia (http://www.myplace.edu.au/). The politicising function of the latter is encoded in the various summaries of each decade’s historical, political, social, cultural, and technological highlights, often associated with the plot of the relevant episode. The page titled “Multiculturalism” reports on the positive amendments to the Commonwealth’s Migration Act 1958 and provides links to photographs of Vietnamese migrants in 1982, exemplifying the values of equality and cultural diversity through Lily and Phuong’s story. The detailed “Teaching Activities” documents available for each episode serve a similar purpose, providing, for example, the suggestion that teachers “ask students to discuss the importance to a new immigrant of retaining links to family, culture and tradition.” The empathetic positioning of Phuong’s situation is further mirrored in the interactive map available for teacher use that enables children to navigate a boat from Vietnam to the Australian coast, encouraging a perspective that is rarely put forward in Australia’s mass media. This is not to suggest that the My Place project is entirely unproblematic. In her postcolonial analysis of Aboriginal children’s literature, Clare Bradford argues that “it’s all too possible for ‘similarities’ to erase difference and the political significances of [a] text” (188). Lily’s schoolteacher’s lesson in the episode “reminds us that boat people have been coming to Australia for a very long time.” However, the implied connection between convicts and asylum seekers triggered by Phuong’s (mis)understanding awkwardly appropriates a mythologised Australian history. Similarly in the “1998” episode, the Muslim character Mohammad’s use of Ramadan for personal strength in order to emulate the iconic Australian cricketer Shane Warne threatens to subsume the “difference” of the diasporic community. Nonetheless, alongside the similarities between individuals and the various ethnic groups that make up the My Place community, important distinctions remain. Each episode begins and/or ends with the child protagonist(s) playing on or around the central motif of the series—a large fig tree—with the characters declaring that the tree is “my place.” While emphasising the importance of individuality in the project’s construction of child citizens, the cumulative effect of these “my place” sentiments, felt over time by characters from different socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, builds a multifaceted conception of Australian identity that consists of numerous (and complementary) “branches.” The project’s multi-platformed content further emphasises this, with the website containing an image of the prominent (literal and figurative) “Community Tree,” through which the viewser can interact with the generations of characters and families from the series (http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/myplace/). The significant role of the ABC’s My Place project showcases the ABC’s remit as a public broadcaster in the digital era. As Tim Brooke-Hunt, the Executive Head of Children’s Content, explains, if the ABC didn’t do it, no other broadcaster was going to come near it. ... I don’t expect My Place to be a humungous commercial or ratings success, but I firmly believe ... that it will be something that will exist for many years and will have a very special place. Conclusion The reversion to iconic aspects of mainstream Anglo-Australian culture is perhaps unsurprising—and certainly telling—when reflecting on the network of local, national, and global forces impacting on the development of a cultural commons. However, this does not detract from the value of the public broadcaster’s construction of child citizens within a clearly self-conscious discourse of “multiculturalism.” The transmedia intertextuality at work across ABC3 projects and platforms serves an important politicising function, offering positive representations of diasporic communities to counter the negative depictions children are exposed to elsewhere, and positioning child viewsers to “participate” in “working through” fraught issues of Australia’s past that still remain starkly relevant today.References ABC. Redefining the Town Square. ABC Annual Report. Sydney: ABC, 2009. Bennett, James, and Niki Strange. “The BBC’s Second-Shift Aesthetics: Interactive Television, Multi-Platform Projects and Public Service Content for a Digital Era.” Media International Australia: Incorporating Culture and Policy 126 (2008): 106-19. Born, Georgina. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Vintage, 2004. boyd, danah. “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 119-42. Bradford, Clare. Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2001. Brooke-Hunt, Tim. Executive Head of Children’s Content, ABC TV. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Ultimo Center, 16 Mar. 2010. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Buckland, Jenny. Chief Executive Officer, Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford and Dr Nina Weerakkody, ACTF, 2 June 2010. Caldwell, John T. “Second Shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity and User Flows.” New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality. Eds. John T. Caldwell and Anna Everett. London: Routledge, 2003. 127-44. Debrett, Mary. “Riding the Wave: Public Service Television in the Multiplatform Era.” Media, Culture & Society 31.5 (2009): 807-27. From, Unni. “Domestically Produced TV-Drama and Cultural Commons.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Eds. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 163-77. Glen, David. Executive Producer, ABC Multiplatform. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Elsternwick, 6 July 2010. Harries, Dan. “Watching the Internet.” The New Media Book. Ed. Dan Harries. London: BFI, 2002. 171-82. Murdock, Graham. “Building the Digital Commons: Public Broadcasting in the Age of the Internet.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Ed. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 213–30. My Place, Volumes 1 & 2: 2008–1888. DVD. ABC, 2009. Northam, Jean A. “Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop-Motion Animation Programmes for Young Children.” Journal for Cultural Research 9.3 (2005): 245-63. Wheatley, Nadia. Making My Place. Sydney and Auckland: HarperCollins, 2010. ———, and Donna Rawlins. My Place, South Melbourne: Longman, 1988.

The Cham language has been written since at least the 4th Century. As such it is the oldest attested language of all of the Austronesian languages. This literary heritage was transmitted using locally modified forms of Indian scripts which were also used to write Sanskrit. With the loss of Cham territories to the Vietnamese, many Cham became displaced and the literary culture was disrupted. In addition, the adoption of Islam by the majority of Cham led many of those who continued to write to do so in variations of the Arabic script. However, the literary potential of the language in Cambodia has not been fully realized in either script – with village scholars using it almost exclusively for religious tracts and for very limited local audiences. In 2011, the United States Embassy initiated a program to encourage the protection of Cham culture and heritage. This Cham Heritage Expansion Program ran from 2011 to 2017 and resulted in the operation of 13 schools in which over 2,500 students of different ages were taught the traditional Cham script. This effort was accompanied by the development of a now significant number of local Cham intellectuals throughout the country who are dedicating themselves to the expansion of the use of Cham as a written language in all aspects of daily life. This presentation documents the way in which interest in this long-neglected writing system was rekindled, and the new avenues for personal and communitarian expression that are being opened by the propagation of Cham literacy. It also presents current developments in the formalization of Cham language education in the country, including the possibilities of bringing the language into the school system.