An Anatomy of Satirical Cartoons in Contemporary Vietnam: Political Communication and Representations of Systemic Corruption in a One-party State

Satirical cartooning in Vietnam is subject to a complex dynamic: an increasingly liberalised and internationalised economy, and the rise of social media in a one-party state. This article examines what state-sanctioned satirical cartoons can reveal about the representation and management of political criticism in such a context. We find a growing trend of depicting corruption as a systemic problem, which is present in 45 per cent of the sample and in 70 per cent of the 20 most-viral cartoons in one of Vietnam’s most popular magazines, Tuoi Tre Cuoi (Youth Humour). This trend can be interpreted as a change in the sensibility of audiences and a shift toward a more tolerant media landscape. The trend, however, may also be a worrying sign of the dual dangers of cynicism in Vietnamese politics: the development of apathy among audiences and the cynical use of art by authorities. Despite these concerns, we argue, political cartoons in Vietnam provide an important public avenue for collective political reflection and everyday social solidarity

社会システム研究21Progler.indd

Abstract This paper contributes to current debates in higher education curriculum reform by outlining the emergence of the corporate university and evaluating the insistence of business interests that universities prepare workers by teaching transferrable skills instead of the disciplines. It considers the relationship between academic and vocational knowledge, suggesting that they may be integrated rather than polarized, and further suggests ways to redress the imbalance between quantity and quality inherent in the corporate university. The paper concludes by looking at the impact of these issues on the theory and practice of the social sciences. Keywords Higher education, corporate university, transferrable skills, curriculum reform. Given the economic climate of the late twentieth and early twenty first century, particularly where state funding and public commitment to higher education has dwindled, many universities are facing a financial crisis. This crisis has encouraged university administrators to think and act more like managers of corporations, focusing on bottom line fi nancial issues as a survival tactic, often paying more attention to style over substance in order to attract more students, who are conceived of as customers. Discussions on curriculum reform in this climate often become polarized around issues of academic versus vocational knowledge and the related question of the quantity versus the quality of students. Concurrently, corporations since the 1980s have been urging universities to undertake curricular shifts toward teaching transferrable skills as a way t