Written by Vo Thanh Hien
Image credit: Arrival in Tübingen for the Taiwan Europe Connectivity Workshop 2026. For international researchers, academic mobility begins long before entering the seminar room. Provided by Vo Thanh Hien.
By the time I tried to steer a punting boat on the Neckar River, the Taiwan Europe Connectivity Workshop no longer felt like a programme of panels and presentations. From my seat, punting had looked deceptively simple. Once I held the long pole myself, the boat seemed determined to move in every direction except where I wanted it to go. My reactions made everyone laugh, and soon several phones were pointed at me.
It was a small moment, but it captured something I had not fully understood before arriving in Tübingen. Trained in International Relations, I had usually understood “connectivity” in large geopolitical terms: Taiwan and Europe, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, cross-Strait relations, or links between states and regions. After one week in Tübingen, the word had become smaller, more personal, and more meaningful.
Getting to the Room
Before the trip, I was surprisingly calm. By the fourth year of my PhD, daily life was already crowded with dissertation work, research papers, and assisting my supervisor. The organisers had prepared the workshop so carefully that I did not have to spend much time worrying about logistics.
The visa was different. Travelling to Europe with a Vietnamese passport often requires additional documents, proof of purpose, fees, and more time than other participants may need. I mention this issue not as a complaint, but as a reminder. It reminded me that academic mobility may be international, but access to it is not equally effortless.
Still, I was confident in the project I was bringing to Germany. My larger concern was whether others would understand it. I study International Relations, but my research approaches politics through education, talent, and mobility, and I also use computational text analysis. This combination does not sit comfortably within a single disciplinary box.
From Strangers to a Temporary Community
The first encounters were naturally somewhat awkward. Most of us did not know one another, and a room full of doctoral researchers can fall quiet quickly. I am usually comfortable starting conversations, but even I was more careful at first.
A small electric fan helped break the ice. Tübingen was hot, and I had brought a portable fan from Vietnam. When I switched it on in the quiet seminar room, everyone noticed. People laughed at how prepared I was, and the formality began to loosen.
Language did something similar. English was our common academic language, but I could also speak Mandarin with many Taiwanese participants. Switching languages made some conversations warmer and more natural. I had arrived as a Vietnamese researcher based in Taiwan, and the workshop made me more conscious of the Southeast Asian perspective I was also bringing into a Taiwan-Europe conversation.
Research soon provided stronger reasons to talk. I was assigned to comment on Huang Kai-Yang’s work on memory, affect, and everyday sovereignty in the Matsu Islands. Liu Ting-Sian’s presentation on Indigenous queer movement-making in Taiwan led to another discussion that continued after the panel. A few of us walked into town, found coffee, and kept talking about fieldwork, theory, lived experience, and questions that had not fitted into the formal session. No one had scheduled that conversation. A group formed almost by itself. That was one of the first moments when I began to understand what connectivity could look like in practice.
When Curiosity Became Recognition
My presentation, “Mapping the Architecture of Talent Governance,” compared how South Korea and Taiwan organise talent policy across education, research, mobility, and industry. Using computational text analysis, I examined how these policy areas connect and argued that talent governance increasingly extends beyond education or migration alone. My main concern was not whether I would sound polished, but whether the room would understand both my method and argument.
This time, participants asked why I compared South Korea and Taiwan, how computational text analysis could capture differences in talent governance, and what the patterns I found actually meant for understanding the two countries’ policy approaches. What encouraged me was not that everyone agreed with the research. They did not. It was that people were curious enough to challenge it seriously.
Image credit: Presenting “Mapping the Architecture of Talent Governance” during the Geo-economics and Talent Mobility panel at the University of Tübingen. Provided by Vo Thanh Hien.
One particularly meaningful exchange came with Dr Klement Gu Ruey-sheng, Taiwan’s Representative in Germany. He listened to my discussion of the New Southbound Policy and later told me about his involvement in its early development. I had encountered the policy retrospectively, through documents and comparison; he had encountered it from the inside, when its direction and resources were still being worked out.
The exchange reminded me that policies have two lives: one experienced by those involved in making them, and another reconstructed later by researchers trying to understand what they became.
At the final dinner at Hohenentringen, over Swabian food and long conversations, I asked Professor Gunter Schubert why he had selected my proposal. His answer stayed with me. What interested him was precisely what had made me uncertain—the attempt to connect education, talent, mobility, politics, and text analysis. Furthermore, He was clear that the project still needed substantial work. For a young researcher, however, hearing that an unconventional direction was worth developing was deeply encouraging. Tübingen did not suddenly tell me which disciplinary box I belonged in. Perhaps the more important lesson was that I did not need an immediate answer.
Image credit: With Dr Klement Gu Ruey-sheng, Taiwan’s Representative in Germany, and Professor Gunter Schubert during the workshop. The encounter brought together policy experience and academic interpretation of Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy. Provided by Vo Thanh Hien.
Connectivity Beyond the Seminar Room
The week also showed me that connectivity does not erase boundaries. Academia and think tanks often work on related questions, yet they can inhabit different professional worlds. Some of that distance was also mine: I trained mainly in academia and do not always know how to enter the think-tank world.
That was why conversations with people who moved between these spaces mattered. At the barbecue, I spoke at length with Hsieh Hao-Hsiang, another NCCU doctoral researcher with experience outside the university. We discussed research directions, professors, potential collaborations, and the less-visible difficulties of building an academic life in Taiwan.
Image credit: The workshop barbecue at Lessingweg. Shared meals created a different setting for conversations about research, careers, and the less visible challenges of academic life. Provided by Vo Thanh Hien.
The workshop also changed relationships with people I already knew. Marvin Bernardo and I had studied in the same programme, but a week in Germany made an existing acquaintance feel more like a friendship. Ai Ke also became someone I felt comfortable approaching with practical academic questions. These encounters reminded me that connection does not require people to become the same. Occasionally it simply makes differences easier to work with.
Outside the seminar room, that process became even more natural. On the Neckar, my failed attempt at punting became a collective photo opportunity. I was continually asking people to take pictures, partly because I genuinely love photographs, but also because I kept thinking this might be the only week this particular group would ever be together in the same place.
The castle visit and the conversations that continued later over Chinese food and gelato made me realise that academic connections often deepen when the formal programme recedes. Away from presentations and assigned roles, conversations with Jo Ko, Wei-Yu Lin, and Ting-Sian moved more openly toward research pressure, living abroad, uncertainty about the future, and the difficulties that accompany doctoral life. These exchanges did not produce a new research collaboration or a concrete professional outcome, but they created something equally important: a sense of trust and recognition among people who were navigating similar stages of academic life. It was through these quieter interactions that the workshop began to feel like a temporary community rather than simply a professional gathering.
What Connectivity Meant When I Left
Before Tübingen, I understood connectivity mainly through the language of International Relations. By the end of the week, I understood it through ordinary acts: asking a question, continuing it over coffee, sharing a meal, switching languages, laughing on a boat, listening to someone describe a difficult PhD year, taking a photograph, and sending a message after everyone had gone home.
Perhaps the most reassuring discovery was that competence and uncertainty are not opposites. Everyone I met was accomplished in some way, yet everyone was also struggling with something: a dissertation, a method, fieldwork, publication, career choices, or simply building a life away from home. The academic community began to feel less like a hierarchy of people who already had the answers and more like a group learning to ask better questions together.
A week is not enough to build every collaboration. It is enough, however, to remember how someone thinks, how seriously they engage with another person’s work, and whether you would feel comfortable writing to them again. That may be the most lasting form of connectivity I brought home from Tübingen: not a completed network, but a set of future possibilities—and the confidence that some of them may one day become real.
Vo Thanh Hien (Frede Wu) is a PhD candidate in the International Doctoral Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. His academic path has moved from English language studies to management and now Asia-Pacific studies, shaping an interdisciplinary interest in education, talent governance, and international mobility across South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. He is particularly interested in how education and mobility shape the development trajectories of emerging economies and their responses to future economic and social change.
This article was published as part of the special issue on “Connectivity: Tübingen ERCCT Taiwan-Europe Workshop“.