KHUAT Thu Hong
Director, Center for Creative Initiatives in Health and Population; Founder, Consultation of Investment in Health Promotion
Interviewers
Natsumi IKOMA,SteeringCommitteeMember,CGS;SeniorAssociate Professor, ICU; Samantha LANDAU, Assistant, CGS
【The article below is the fulltext of the article that appears in the fifteenth issue of the CGS Newsletter.】
In the 2012 autumn term, ICU will welcome Professor Thu Hong Khuat from Vietnam to teach the course "Special Topics in Gender Studies." She talked to Natsumi Ikoma and Samantha Landau about her life and her research interests.
1) Where are you from?
I am from Hanoi, Vietnam. I trained in Education Psychology at Moscow National University from 1979 to 1984. After graduation I returned to my country and started to work in the Institute of Sociology, where I earned my PhD degree in Family Sociology in 1997. Between the years 2000 and 2001, I worked as a gender specialist for the United Nations Development Program in Vietnam. In May 2002, together with three colleagues, I founded an independent research organization named the Institute for Social Development Studies.
2) What is your research interest?
My major research interests include gender and sexuality. These fields serve as the platform on which I study issues such as HIV-related stigma, sex work, migration, and domestic work.
3) Why are you interested in 2)?
I see sexuality and gender as lenses through which one can understand not only individual matters but also broader social processes, issues of injustice, inequality, freedom, democracy, and development.
4) What would you like to teach at ICU?
I am very excited about the opportunity of teaching at ICU. I would like to offer a course on sexuality and a smaller course on gender and development. The course on sexuality may include topics like the social construction of sexual identities, the body and personhood, sexuality and the media, bio-power, and sexuality and politics. Regarding the course on gender and development, I am deciding between the topics of gender and migration or gender and domestic work. I hope Japanese students will find these topics relevant.
5) What is the current situation surrounding Gender and Sexuality Education in Vietnam?
It is ironic that although the issues of teen pregnancy and abortion, child sexual abuse, HIV/AIDS transmission through sexual contact, and other negative matters related to sex have increasingly been of public concern, gender and sexuality education remains very poorly developed. Gender started to be taught in social science universities in Vietnam around the mid-1990s, mainly because of pressure from internationally funded development projects. Up to the present, few universities have a department or center for gender studies. Instead, gender is included as a subject in family sociology or population studies. Teaching gender is very limited to providing facts about women but little about theoretical and methodological matters; furthermore, sexuality has never been thought of as a "decent" subject for teaching in a formal program until very recently. In schools, scant information on reproductive health is provided in the so-called "life skills" or "family life" education included in civic education. However, there is still a great reluctance in making sexuality a formal subject to be taught in schools and universities. Except for the training program delivered by my organization for the University of Journalism and Communication to integrate sexuality in the teaching program, little effort has been made, and so far there is no similar program at other universities.
For a decade or more, my organization and a few other local NGOs have actively advocated for integrating these subjects into formal education. During the past five years, we have conducted an annual training course called the Vietnam Nationwide Institute on Sexuality and Sexual Health for about 100 researchers, educators, health professionals, and media professionals. Starting in 2010, we organized biennial national symposiums on sexuality to encourage researchers, educators, and practitioners to share their research findings, working experiences, and initiatives to build the field in Vietnam. The second symposium, which will take place in August this year, will focus on sexuality education because this topic has been very enthusiastically discussed and attracted great public attention in recent years. We hope the symposium will aid the acceleration of the integration of gender and sexuality education into formal education in Vietnam.
6) Any message for ICU students?
I have visited Japan several times on short trips, but I still lack knowledge about Japanese culture and society. So I would very much appreciate support from ICU students who can connect our discussions with the Japanese context by actively asking questions and giving examples or comments. Besides, I see the role of educator as facilitator rather than lecturer or presenter. In other words, I believe that the active participation of students is an important part of teaching. I am very excited at the opportunity to work at ICU. I look forward to having interesting discussions with students and interactions with other faculty members.
This interview was conducted in June 2012. However, at the end of August, Professor Hong became suddenly ill and her trip to Japan and classes at ICU have been cancelled. We are praying for her very speedy recovery. With the continued hope that Professor Hong will be able to come teach at ICU in the near future, this article has been printed in its original form.