In the course of her history, Champa established and maintained maritime commercial and economic relationships with Asian nations and beyond. The Cham people inherited the cultural achievements from earlier cultures and created the essential basis for the development of the Viet people when these communities arrived in and explored the Southern territory. This helped them not only to maintain their traditional culture, but also to integrate into the newly created thought and spirituality. The Viet government did not only operate the old Champa commercial ports but also explored new ports and took the chance for development. They established more relations with Asian and European trading partners; maintained the trading routines between in South - North and West - East directions and did not only carry out the traditional trade, but also reached for the Mercantilism. Those helped the Viet people to claim their role and position in the foreign relation with the area for centuries.

A more holistic approach towards disaster risk reduction and management takes into account a “multicausal understanding of disasters” (Berg 2017). This holistic paradigm led to an increased involvement of the social sciences as well as the humanities in documenting and analyzing social and cultural factors that contribute to our general understanding of disasters and could be useful in formulating ways to reduce disaster risk and vulnerability and in developing new technologies useful for disaster response and mitigation. It also prompted academicians and practitioners to look into the asymmetries in the way that local communities prepare and respond to disasters.
A vital source of information for understanding how people in various communities view disasters is the language that they speak. Language could tell us how the speakers relate to their lived environments and how they see disasters based on their own understanding of the physical world. By utilizing conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), people are able to encode various types of disasters as they experience them and subsequently develop appropriate responses to such life events.
This paper highlights the importance of linguistics, particularly of language documentation, in the whole space of disaster risk reduction and management by showing how linguistic metaphors are utilized in lexicalizing disaster terms in selected languages of the Philippines― a country in the Pacific Rim and one of the most disaster prone territories in the world. The metaphorization of disaster terms ensures that the speakers of a language are able to frame a corresponding mental representation for each type of disaster, which in turn will aid them to react appropriately every time a disaster occurs. In addition, metaphorization is also necessary to characterize rare types of disasters (e.g. storm surge) and to manifest the people's understanding of such phenomena. This study hopes to contribute to the literature about the importance of language documentation in analyzing human behavior vis-à-vis disasters, and in formulating policies that could both mitigate disasters and build resilience in local communities in the Philippines, and to a larger extent― in the Pacific Rim.

Churches, congregations, and faith-based organizations (FBOs) are among the most visible, dynamic, and politically positioned institutions in Latinx/Hispanic communities. This paper focuses on the role that Latinx and non-Latinx churches, congregations, and FBOs play in leading civic engagement and readiness to mobilize in times of need for social action in the U.S. Analysis in this paper builds on face-to-face interviews conducted with Latinx pastors representing several cities in the U.S., observations from survey responses conducted for the Chicago Latino Congregations Study, and on newspaper accounts of recent resurgent faith-based sanctuary movement activism. The Chicago Latinx Congregations Study (CLCS)―a multi-level, comprehensive study of Latinx congregations in metropolitan Chicago includes surveys of clergy, lay leaders, and congregants completed in 2007―and provided a unique, in-depth window into Latinx Christianity embedded in a community context. The paper shows that social activism resides in the ebb and flow of particular political moments and focuses on religious organizations readiness to mobilize on behalf of immigrants beginning in local community settings.

I first visited Jing ethnic community in Jing Island (Dongxing, Guangxi, China) in 1999 and since then I have been particularly close to this land. Although I have published 4 books and 10 papers about the culture of Jing ethnic community in Jing Island but every time I come back there I am always surprised by cultural practices of local community, and the ways local community introduce to us and other guests about their culture. Looking back their culture in almost two decades, especially after the Economic Reform (from 1978 in China, from 1986 in Vietnam), border opening, and trade development between Dongxing (China) and Mong Cai (Vietnam) since the 1990s, I could observe the agency and flexibility of people in their cultural practices to highlight their traditional culture, and enhance these cultural resources. Their flexibility vividly illustrates how a community adapts to and actively makes use of their cultural resources in socio-cultural development to confirm their existence in the context of trade development and globalisation.

Latin American Studies in China can be dated back to the early 1960s and have witnessed more than five decades of development. The article offers a review of the history of Latin American Studies in China, the major transformations, and the current status. Based on continuous efforts, the Latin American studies in China evolved gradually from focusing on translation and introduction of foreign scholars' research works to conducting a comprehensive research including basic theoretical and issueoriented researches. It is especially noticeable that they gained a momentum in the past tens of years due to fast and sustained development of the Chinese-Latin American relations. Presently the studies cover economics, politics, social and cultural issues, and international relations in the region and are extending to non-traditional areas such as anthropology, jurisprudence, architecture, religion and environment. There are already over fifty research institutions related to Latin American studies in China, a remarkable increase of numbers compared to twenty years ago. To promote the studies, China needs to further expand the research team, improve their academic research ability and develop stronger international cooperation.