One of my responsibilities in my current position is to make videos of discussions with scholars. The latest video is of a discussion that I had with Phan Lê Hà, founder of the Engaging With Vietnam initiative (which for certain undisclosed reasons I promote on this blog) and currently a Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and a Senior Professor in the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education (SHBIE) at Universiti Brunei Darussalam.
Our discussion was about “Higher Education, English, and the Idea of ‘the West’: Globalizing and Encountering a Global South Regional University.” In the following video, Phan Lê Hà discusses her ongoing work on the globalization of higher education in Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Middle East, and details a case study on one particular regional university in Southeast Asia that is actively globalizing by engaging with other Southeast Asian nations.
Although we do not discuss Southeast Asian history in this video, it is interesting to see what is happening today in light of the past, and indeed, as Phan Lê Hà’s work shows, the colonial past and its associated idea of “the West” all loom large in current developments in the world of higher education in Southeast Asia.
