The article, published in the newspaper’s tourism section, highlights our recent activities, including presenting part of our work at an international symposium in the United States, and sharing perspectives from ethnic minority communities in Northern Vietnam with a wider audience.
It’s encouraging to see more attention to this line of research and its relevance to sustainable, community-centered tourism.
Many thanks to Nguyệt Linh from Ngày Nay for the thoughtful piece.
You can read the full article here: Đưa tiếng nói các cộng đồng làm du lịch miền núi phía Bắc tới diễn đàn quốc
English translation of the article
Bringing the Voices of Northern Mountain Tourism Communities to the International Stage
By Nguyệt Linh
April 21, 2026
(Ngày Nay) — An international collaborative research project titled “Outdoor Tourism and Transformations in the Cultural Narratives of Ethnic Minority Communities in Vietnam” is attracting growing attention from the global academic community.
The project is funded by the British Academy and conducted in collaboration between the University of Cumbria, VinUniversity, and the VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities, with the participation of local communities from H’Mông, Dao, Mường, Giáy, and Tày ethnic groups.
The project is led by Associate Professor Jamie McPhie (University of Cumbria), with contributions from Professor Myles Lynch (VinUniversity) and Dr. Trần Hoài (VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities).
Recently, part of the project’s findings was presented at the Northeast Recreation Research Symposium (NERR), held in Virginia Beach, USA, from March 29–31, 2026. NERR is one of North America’s leading academic forums on outdoor recreation and natural environments, providing an important platform to share perspectives from Vietnam with the international scholarly community.
Cultural Transformation and Community Identity
The project aims to explore how outdoor tourism—including trekking, adventure tourism, and eco-cultural tourism—affects cultural narratives, sense of place, worldviews, and community identity among ethnic minority groups in Northern Vietnam.
According to Dr. Trần Hoài, the research emphasizes that tourism is not a one-way impact but a process of meaning-making, power negotiation, and transformation of everyday life. The project originates from concerns that many forms of indigenous knowledge are gradually being assimilated or lost under the pressure of dominant cultures.
To address this, the research adopts a community-centered approach, empowering local people as co-researchers rather than treating them merely as subjects of study.
The project focuses on three field sites representing different stages of tourism development:
- Sa Pa (Lào Cai): A well-established destination attracting millions of visitors annually, where H’Mông and Giáy communities actively participate as trekking guides, homestay hosts, and textile artisans.
- Mù Cang Chải (Yên Bái): An emerging destination known for its terraced rice fields, experiencing rapid growth in tourism and infrastructure.
- Đà Bắc (Hòa Bình): A newly developing community-based tourism model, where Dao and Mường communities are beginning to host international visitors.
Conducted from 2024 to 2026, the project incorporates participatory methods, including providing cameras to local residents to document their daily lives and experiences. These images are later discussed collectively and developed into collaborative visual exhibitions. The research team also conducts ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation.
Key Findings
At NERR 2026, the team presented three major findings, emphasizing that tourism is not merely an economic activity but a complex socio-cultural process:
1. Tourism as narrative-making
Local landscapes are being reinterpreted and “branded” into tourist destinations. Cultural practices—such as farming experiences, staged ethnic weddings, and cooking classes—are selectively packaged as consumable products. Importantly, local people themselves, from guides to young TikTok creators, actively shape and share new narratives about their communities.
2. Tourism as everyday transformation
Tourism is reshaping livelihoods, shifting from purely agricultural work to hybrid models combining farming, guiding, and hospitality. Social roles are evolving—particularly among young H’Mông women becoming trekking guides, learning English, and engaging with global visitors. Spatial changes are also evident as land use shifts between “tourism zones” and “non-tourism areas.”
3. Tourism as power negotiation
Tourism creates a space where different development visions are negotiated among local communities, authorities, external experts, and even within communities themselves. This highlights the need for meaningful community consultation rather than top-down decision-making.
Contributions to Sustainable Tourism
The project’s presentation at NERR marks a significant milestone, as it is one of the first times that the voices of H’Mông, Dao, Mường, Giáy, and Tày communities have been directly represented at a major international academic forum. This affirms their role not just as research subjects, but as knowledge producers.
For Vietnam’s tourism sector, the project contributes both theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence for sustainable mountain tourism models—ones that center communities, respect cultural complexity, and avoid reducing identity to mere “products.”
Internationally, the project introduces perspectives from the Global South and indigenous knowledge systems, helping diversify understandings of the relationships between people, environment, and outdoor recreation—fields often dominated by North American contexts.
Professor Myles Liam Lynch is currently based at the College of Arts and Sciences, VinUniversity (Hà Nội), and is also affiliated with UNESCO Chair Vietnam, specializing in sustainable tourism and cultural regeneration.
Dr. Trần Hoài is a lecturer and Head of the Heritage Studies Department at the VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities. He earned his PhD and has previously conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany.
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