Jamie Gillen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3635496 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jamie Gillen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jamie |
| FAMILY NAME | Gillen |
| SIGNATURE | GILLEN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1618-724X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 259 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Land Deactivation Amidst Land Policy Inertia In Northern Vietnam
Drawing on research in rural or peri-urban communes administered by Hanoi, this article discusses “land deactivation” – the withdrawal of farmers from farming – a reform emerging in a long-cultivated rice growing region of Vietnam. This transformation does not fully align with official policy orientations and poses challenges to the state’s strategic objective of maintaining national rice security. The proximate cause of idle and abandoned land i…
Ruralization in the Global North? A Southeast Asia-centered response to Santi and Matthews
This response speaks to ruralization's multifaceted potential by bringing Santi and Matthews’ three ruralizing frames – autonomy, reparation, and rematriation – into conversation with Southeast Asia. Mapping Southeast Asia onto their analysis of ruralization as a means of decolonizing land relations proves less fruitful than thinking about ruralization as a concept with productively divergent histories and geographies.
Geographical imaginations of the global Vietnam War
The Vietnam War is one of the most profound episodes to occur in the twentieth century yet geography’s influence on appraising the conflict is scarcely known inside the discipline and typically ignored outside of it. This paper responds to these issues by presenting three concepts on the global nature of the war: territory, circuitry, and memory. Moving beyond the myth of a singular Vietnam and United States, my argument centers on the global Vie…
Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective
Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective provides the first multicountry, inter-disciplinary analysis of the single most important social and economic formation in the Asian countryside: the smallholder. Based on ten core country chapters, the volume describes and explains the persistence, transformations, functioning and future of the smallholder and smallholdings across East and Southeast Asia. As well as providing a source book for schola…
Looking inward
Southeast Asian governments were forced to reposition their tourism markets as a result of border lockdowns brought on by the COVID-19 virus. We examine the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries’ marketing strategies intended to bolster their respective domestic tourism industries during the pandemic years of 2020–2022. This paper sketches three approaches that dominated the region at the time: building national communit…
Making tourism geographies
This collection of responses to Alan Lew’s 2024 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting Special Lecture in Honolulu, Hawai’i, Why Travel? (Lew, 2024), reflects his enduring influence on the field of tourism geographies and its growth as a vibrant community of practice. As the founding Editor-in-Chief of Tourism Geographies, Alan pioneered an inclusive, interdisciplinary vision for the field, shaping its trajectory for decades. Tr…
Tourism geopolitics
This paper critically reviews tourism geopolitics’ lifespan with a focus on both recent developments and its longer history. Contemporary times show increased attention paid by geographers to tourism geopolitics. This work follows more intensive global cross-border leisure travel underpinned by strong expressions of nationhood. The everyday geopolitical dimensions of tourism reverberate across scales and inform diplomacy, international relations,…
Collective Care in Three Vietnamese Contexts
The new tourism geopolitics
In this introduction to the special issue, The new tourism geopolitics, we call on scholars to bridge tourism geographies and political geography through the framework of tourism geopolitics. The issue offers novel conceptualizations that extend beyond the study of material borders, passports, and nation-state discourses. Rather, the authors of this issue home in on the entanglements between tourism and geopolitics in the form of events, everyday…
"Finding home in a paper - Revisiting "The construction of national identity through the production of ritual and spectacle
Singapore as a "Little Red Dot".The phrase has since been appropriated positively by Singaporeans and the Singapore government to proclaim its strength, or how it "punches above its weight" globally.3 An employment pass holder is designated for Singapore's skilled migrants and requires the worker to meet or exceed a specified monthly salary, hold tertiary education diplomas, and is
Beyond binaries? Spatial possibilities in Southeast Asia
The thoughtful and incisive responses to our article push us to address the central tension in our conceptualization of ruralization, which concerns how it both unsettles and reproduces binary thinking. On the one hand, we draw upon work in Southeast Asia that confounds binary mappings of urban versus rural space and associated divisions of labour in ways that redress the intellectual preponderance of the urban and urbanization. On the other hand…
Geographies of ruralization
This paper proposes ‘ruralization’ as a concept that human geographers are well placed to develop across the rural-urban geography divide and in dialogue with scholars in cognate fields. We understand ruralization as the processual, more-than-residual, and geographically-variegated socio-spatial dynamics of contemporary human engagements with rural land, livelihoods, and lifestyles. Our approach comprises three prominent dynamics of ruralization …
Vietnam at the Vanguard
Retaining the Old Countryside, Embracing the New Countryside
Vietnam’s New Rural Development program envisages the creation of a newly modern rural Vietnam. Drawing on fieldwork, this paper argues that the program has had little bearing on peasant livelihood strategies. The emergence of deagrarianization has not arisen as a result of the program but because of household interest in maintaining a diverse set of income activities. These two contrasting rural realities—the advance of deagrarianization against…
Contested Territory
Christian C. Lentz. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. xvi and 331 pp., illus. $35 cloth (ISBN 9780300233957).We are delighted to bring together this forum on Contested Territory by Christ
The Collaboration Project between Engaging With Vietnam and the Journal of Vietnamese Studies
Research Article| February 01 2020 The Collaboration Project between Engaging With Vietnam and the Journal of Vietnamese Studies Phan Lê Hà, Phan Lê Hà Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Liam C. Kelley, Liam C. Kelley Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jamie Gillen Jamie Gillen Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietname…
Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective
Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective provides the first multicountry, inter-disciplinary analysis of the single most important social and economic formation in the Asian countryside: the smallholder. Based on ten core country chapters, the volume describes and explains the persistence, transformations, functioning and future of the smallholder and smallholdings across East and Southeast Asia. As well as providing a source book for schola…
Economic transition without agrarian transformation
Geopolitical encounters of tourism
Nice to meet you
This paper advocates for a clearer understanding of the politics of introductions and partings in fieldwork by engaging with the geographical literature on the encounter. Conducting research with people in the field presents investigators with unfamiliar and confusing cultural rituals involving how to present oneself, what to say, and how to physically interact with respondents on meeting them for the first time. This is also true during the mome…
The Prospect of Elsewhere
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 spec…
It begins with the bombs
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 …
Walking down memory lane
Furthering Mekong ontologies
Rethinking Whiteness and Masculinity in Geography
This paper evaluates the spatial politics of fieldwork in Vietnam in order to think through the connections between whiteness, masculinity, and geography. In drawing attention to how the consumption of alcohol underwrites daily activities in Vietnam, as well as fieldwork activities, I show that research ethics are underpinned by unique spatial contexts that do not conform to conventional accounts of masculinity and whiteness in the global North. …
The Prospect of Elsewhere
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 spec…
Geographies of ruralization
This paper proposes ‘ruralization’ as a concept that human geographers are well placed to develop across the rural-urban geography divide and in dialogue with scholars in cognate fields. We understand ruralization as the processual, more-than-residual, and geographically-variegated socio-spatial dynamics of contemporary human engagements with rural land, livelihoods, and lifestyles. Our approach comprises three prominent dynamics of ruralization …
Geopolitical encounters of tourism
Tourism and Nation Building at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Using evidence from what is probably Vietnam's 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 aud…
Economic transition without agrarian transformation
Bringing the countryside to the city
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 Asi…
Tourism geopolitics
This paper critically reviews tourism geopolitics’ lifespan with a focus on both recent developments and its longer history. Contemporary times show increased attention paid by geographers to tourism geopolitics. This work follows more intensive global cross-border leisure travel underpinned by strong expressions of nationhood. The everyday geopolitical dimensions of tourism reverberate across scales and inform diplomacy, international relations,…
Streets of fire
This paper explores the relationship between travelling on a motorbike and the fieldwork experience in V ietnam. In doing so it adds to the literature on mobilities and fieldwork in the G lobal S outh by showcasing an aspect of research that has thus far been underexplored in geography: what role does moving through the fieldsite have on researcher–participant relationships? Through two sections outlining driving and passengering on a motorbike, …
Geography's role in nurturing postgraduate students
In this commentary we encourage thinking about how to effectively nurture postgraduate students in geography. We offer some ideas and strategies for supervisors who mentor postgrads for careers in and beyond the academy. We also consider how supervisor-student relationships can take advantage of geography's interdisciplinarity to develop a well rounded postgraduate experience
It begins with the bombs
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 …
Investing in the field
The new tourism geopolitics
In this introduction to the special issue, The new tourism geopolitics, we call on scholars to bridge tourism geographies and political geography through the framework of tourism geopolitics. The issue offers novel conceptualizations that extend beyond the study of material borders, passports, and nation-state discourses. Rather, the authors of this issue home in on the entanglements between tourism and geopolitics in the form of events, everyday…
An Examination of Entrepreneurial Relationships Between the State and Nonstate in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Using evidence from the Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam tourism industry, this study critiques the entrepreneurial city model on the grounds that it posits a normative argument separating the governance practices of the urban state from the for-profit activities of the private sector. This division masks the long-standing encroachment of the public (or state) sector into "private" (or nonstate) arenas, and limits the nonstate sector's role in fo…
Rethinking Whiteness and Masculinity in Geography
This paper evaluates the spatial politics of fieldwork in Vietnam in order to think through the connections between whiteness, masculinity, and geography. In drawing attention to how the consumption of alcohol underwrites daily activities in Vietnam, as well as fieldwork activities, I show that research ethics are underpinned by unique spatial contexts that do not conform to conventional accounts of masculinity and whiteness in the global North. …
Urbanizing existential authenticity
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…
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 …
Comprehensive research in geography
10.1111/area.12021
A battle worth winning
Beyond binaries? Spatial possibilities in Southeast Asia
The thoughtful and incisive responses to our article push us to address the central tension in our conceptualization of ruralization, which concerns how it both unsettles and reproduces binary thinking. On the one hand, we draw upon work in Southeast Asia that confounds binary mappings of urban versus rural space and associated divisions of labour in ways that redress the intellectual preponderance of the urban and urbanization. On the other hand…
Furthering Mekong ontologies
"Some problems with "the Asian Century
Tourism and Entrepreneurialism in Southeast Asian Cities
This study reviews recent literatures related to entrepreneurship in the Southeast Asian urban tourism sector. The study is divided into three sections. The first section concerns urban identity. I outline recent debates surrounding the disparity between tourist stereotypes of the region's cities and discursive attempts by the local governments to counter them. I argue that the twin themes of harmony and convergence are used by Southeast Asia's u…
The co‐production of narrative in an entrepreneurial city
In April 2001 Cincinnati, Ohio, erupted into violence and protracted unrest after the police shooting of an unarmed African‐American named Timothy Thomas. African‐American interest groups in the city subsequently organized an economic boycott of downtown businesses. In response to the demonstration and the boycott, the Cincinnati government issued a marketing campaign entitled ‘We're On the Move!’, intending to give nod to past failures and launc…
De-mythologizing the faculty–postgraduate writing experience in geography
Greater Boston
An Expression of Appreciation
The co‐production of narrative in an entrepreneurial city
In April 2001 Cincinnati, Ohio, erupted into violence and protracted unrest after the police shooting of an unarmed African‐American named Timothy Thomas. African‐American interest groups in the city subsequently organized an economic boycott of downtown businesses. In response to the demonstration and the boycott, the Cincinnati government issued a marketing campaign entitled ‘We're On the Move!’, intending to give nod to past failures and launc…
An Examination of Entrepreneurial Relationships Between the State and Nonstate in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Using evidence from the Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam tourism industry, this study critiques the entrepreneurial city model on the grounds that it posits a normative argument separating the governance practices of the urban state from the for-profit activities of the private sector. This division masks the long-standing encroachment of the public (or state) sector into "private" (or nonstate) arenas, and limits the nonstate sector's role in fo…
Tourism and Entrepreneurialism in Southeast Asian Cities
This study reviews recent literatures related to entrepreneurship in the Southeast Asian urban tourism sector. The study is divided into three sections. The first section concerns urban identity. I outline recent debates surrounding the disparity between tourist stereotypes of the region's cities and discursive attempts by the local governments to counter them. I argue that the twin themes of harmony and convergence are used by Southeast Asia's u…
A battle worth winning
Investing in the field
Comprehensive research in geography
10.1111/area.12021
Tourism and Nation Building at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Using evidence from what is probably Vietnam's 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 aud…
Urbanizing existential authenticity
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…
Tour guides as tourist products in Dalat, Vietnam
This paper investigates how tour guides position themselves in Vietnam's transition from a command economy to market socialism. The case study of the Dalat Easy Riders motorcycle guides demonstrates that tour guides take advantage of, personify and contribute to the economic, political and social transitions in the country. Relatedly, we argue that Vietnam's transition (known as đổi mới) is a key component of the Easy Riders' promotional narrativ…
De-mythologizing the faculty–postgraduate writing experience in geography
Geography's role in nurturing postgraduate students
In this commentary we encourage thinking about how to effectively nurture postgraduate students in geography. We offer some ideas and strategies for supervisors who mentor postgrads for careers in and beyond the academy. We also consider how supervisor-student relationships can take advantage of geography's interdisciplinarity to develop a well rounded postgraduate experience
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 …
Introduction
This set of six short papers critically addresses the date of 30 April 2015, which marks the fortieth anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam – or what is often called the “fall of Saigon” in t
Rethinking Whiteness and Masculinity in Geography
This paper evaluates the spatial politics of fieldwork in Vietnam in order to think through the connections between whiteness, masculinity, and geography. In drawing attention to how the consumption of alcohol underwrites daily activities in Vietnam, as well as fieldwork activities, I show that research ethics are underpinned by unique spatial contexts that do not conform to conventional accounts of masculinity and whiteness in the global North. …
Bringing the countryside to the city
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 Asi…
Streets of fire
This paper explores the relationship between travelling on a motorbike and the fieldwork experience in V ietnam. In doing so it adds to the literature on mobilities and fieldwork in the G lobal S outh by showcasing an aspect of research that has thus far been underexplored in geography: what role does moving through the fieldsite have on researcher–participant relationships? Through two sections outlining driving and passengering on a motorbike, …
"Some problems with "the Asian Century
Walking down memory lane
Furthering Mekong ontologies
The Prospect of Elsewhere
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 spec…
It begins with the bombs
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 …
Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective
Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective provides the first multicountry, inter-disciplinary analysis of the single most important social and economic formation in the Asian countryside: the smallholder. Based on ten core country chapters, the volume describes and explains the persistence, transformations, functioning and future of the smallholder and smallholdings across East and Southeast Asia. As well as providing a source book for schola…
Economic transition without agrarian transformation
Political science (25 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Geography (22 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (17 works) · Economics (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (13 works) · Economic geography (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · Tourism (11 works)