VNUHCM Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities

Ethics Review Board in Social Sciences and Humanities: theoretical issues and the implementation model in University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City

2023-05-16T20:32:56+00:00

Ethics Review Board, or Research Ethics Committee, or Institutional Review Board is responsible for reviewing and monitoring the conduct of research to ensure no physical or mental harms should occur to the research subjects as well as secure their rights and benefits in participating in the research. Such institution is widely available in research bodies and higher education institutions in developed countries. In the context of international integration in Vietnam, examining the Ethics Review Board model for establishing and operating it in Vietnamese universities has become an urgent need. This process put forward the necessity for understanding the history of the evolution of research ethics principles, international precedence, and the Vietnamese reality is a necessary step. This article is based on existing materials to present the historical evolution of research ethics principles, key internationally significant documents, international examples of Ethics Review Board in the world as well as the current situation in Vietnam, when a non-biomedical Board has been established by University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City. The article is also among the first of its kind in systematically examine Ethics Review Board in Vietnam, and it also calls for further research on such topic and how to implement the institution in conducting research in Vietnamese higher education institutions.

For developing religious resources in Vietnam today, the religion rethinking must-have in light of ousiology

2023-05-16T20:39:46+00:00

The mobilization of religious resources in community building and development in Vietnam today is just the mobilization of money and human strength, without resource accumulation. This is not rationality. The ousiological religion rethinking is necessary. In light of ousiology, we get a view of the identity and way of religion existence in each dimension: Social Consciousness, Social Facts, Religious Facts, Culture Facts, and Social Capital. This view integrates the general knowledge of religion to determine: The social capital of religion is an ensemble of ousiological attributes of religion that makes with the being of man. The Man Being is the resource of religion. In light of ousiology, we can forecast the dangers and threats of the Age, which are challenging the existence of religions, and provide the contents for the restructuring a religious worldview, religious rituals and activities, and ways to preserve religious and moral values, etc., as an adaptation for religion to exist. In light of ousiology, we understand that it is inevitable for the social capital of religion to participate in the capital flow of the market economy. New challenges are emerging and the total mobilization of society to overcome these challenges is necessary for the authentic existence of religion.

Audience as constructivism discourses: Rethinking on the Media Audience Study

2023-05-20T21:13:13+00:00

This article aims to analyze and interpret the following two basic contents. Firstly, we would examine the theoretical viewpoints on the use and gratification of Herta Herzog and Elihu Katz together with encoding/decoding theses of Stuart Hall, which are recognized by the scholastic world as the researches that paved ways for the study of Media Audience. The views of those theorists have led to the discourses on behavioral psychology and meaning construction of the audience in the interactions with the media. The mid-20th century findings have yielded the two research paradigms that focus on the public activism, as opposed to the assumptions of their passivity in the theoretical perspective of the effects study tradition. We evaluate these discourses in the context of the cold war, the Leftist movements, and the ideological innovations of the neo-Marxist school. Secondly, by assessing the two public discourses’ contributions, we will further consider the view of public ethnography and especially the trend of media constructionism. These are two theoretical tendencies in media public research that have taken place from the 1980s to the present. On the basis of the assessment of the strengths as well as the limitations of these tendencies, especially constructionism- a theoretical trend with the ambition to study the public in relation to the media production world, we will yield new claims about the Media Audience study theory.

The killer character in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories - a view from Hegel's philosophy of self-consciousness

2023-05-26T22:21:26+00:00

Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are often evaluated based on his artistic talent – his ability to use special composition techniques such as the Single Effect technique, a literary theory proposed by Edgar Allan Poe himself, in order to extract highly effective emotional responses from readers, including the fight-or-flight response. This trend of research focuses on writing techniques, which are consistent with Edgar Allan Poe's conception of the importance of effects in artistic creation. Providing a different approach, this article appreciates his short stories in the aspect of philosophical thought that he conveyed in his works, in particular his ability to not only conclude the general rule from which criminal psychology was born, but also to suggest the way out of it. Finding anger, lust for murder, and terror of death, which constantly dominate the surface of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror works, the study tries to understand the core principle hidden in his works that caused such psychological phenomena. Guided by Hegel’s philosophy, this research explains that the desire to self-certainty in the primitive form – through fight to death – of self-consciousness is the psychological operation mechanism of the character in Edgar Allan Poe’s horror short stories.