Grounding the transnational: A Vietnamese scholar’s autoethnography

Abstract

Departing from the dominant trend of favoring flexibility, flattened relations, and deterritorialization in featuring the transnational, this autoethnographic inquiry theorizes and exemplifies how the gravity of place may give rise to the evolvement of scholarship in the context of transnational mobility. I examine my own career trajectory to demonstrate how groundedness results from the dynamics between displacement and emplacement. While recounting my experience of moving back and forth between Western universities and my home institution in Vietnam, I explore issues such as the nation building framework for transnational mobility, scholarly self-formation, and community cultivation. The study centers a mode of emplacement termed ‘existential commitment’. It calls attention to the cultivation of a small, immediate scholarly community as a form of scholarship in the global periphery. The emphasis is on how the transnational can be grounded in local academic practices that address the world at multiple layers and scales.

Introduction

While mobility and transnationality are not new phenomena, it is widely assumed that they now constitute the very fabric of contemporary life. Within the last three decades, many scholars have declared a mobility turn (e.g. Urry, 2000) or a transnational turn (e.g. Goyal, 2017) in their fields. On that backdrop, comparative and international education research has occasionally explored various dimensions of transnational academic mobility (e.g. Bedenlier, 2018; Schweisfurth, 2012; Streitwieser et al., 2012). Reflecting upon my lived experience and the relevant literature across disciplines, I pay special attention to the importance of place in transnational scholarly experience and practice, the problem of space being understudied in comparative and international education research. In this self-reflexive writing, I examine my own career trajectory to demonstrate how groundedness results from the dynamics between displacement and emplacement in transnational academic mobility. In a similar vein with Phan (2011), the study is a critical response to the overemphasis on the global dimension of knowledge production and the romanticization of globalization as celebrating a world without borders. Departing from the dominant trend of favoring flexibility, flattened fields of relations, and deterritorialization in featuring transnationality, it exemplifies how the gravity of place gives rise to the evolvement of scholarship in the context of transnational mobility. The study centers a mode of emplacement called ‘existential commitment’. I argue that the transnational can be grounded in local academic practices that address the world at multiple layers and scales.

More specifically, after discussing my theoretical considerations and mode of inquiry, I will narrate stories of how my mobility was made possible by a nation building agenda, how my scholarly self was formed in centers of knowledge production, and how my struggle in resettlement in Vietnam involved the cultivation of a small, immediate scholarly community, which I consider as a distinct form of scholarship in the global periphery and the crux of the transnational in my experience.

Grounding the transnational: Place as a theoretical lens

Transnationalism, ‘flows’, ‘networks’, and their limits

In studying the transnational, transnationalism has been a keyword and a contested term. In its most popular and broadest sense, transnationalism refers to the receding economic and sociopolitical significance of boundaries among nation-states and the heightened interconnectivity between people. It is frequently used interchangeably with globalization. The phenomenon of transnationalism is often seen with the metaphors of ‘flows’ and ‘networks’, which tend to underestimate complex relations of discontinuity and continuity, weight, solidity, viscosity, and stickiness.

Studies of privileged, highly mobile individuals usually portray them as belonging to a transnational space of flows where ideas, people, and things travel almost freely. Ley (2004: 157, cited in Bielewska and Jaskułowski, 2017: 348) claimed that ‘the erosion of transaction costs and the increasing flexibility of citizenship arrangements have created an “ungrounded” or “deterritorialized” transnational class moving at will and occupying virtually undifferentiated space’. The claim eliminates the impact of locality on the everyday life of the transnational elite and their social identities.

Transnationalism studies have also examined the networks of connections that migrants maintain between their country of settlement and their country of origin, or what has been termed ‘transnational social fields’ by some scholars (Binaisa, 2013). Fouron and Schiller (2001: 544) defined a ‘transnational social field’ as ‘an unbounded terrain of interlocking egocentric networks that extends across the borders of two or more nations-states and that incorporates its participants in the day-to-day activities of social reproduction in these various locations’. Tran and Gomes (2017) made use of the notion to bring into view how the flow of ideas, practice, and social networks associated with transnational student mobility was embedded within evolving relationships. They advanced the notion of ‘connectedness’ as a positive mode of being in a transnational social field. In this manner, the mobile subjects are anchored within networks instead of floating freely. Nonetheless, connectedness appears too light to pronounce a mode of being that bears the fruit of significant scholarship. The metaphor of ‘networks’ emphasizes flexibility rather than endurance.

While the discourse of the knowledge economy characterizes knowledge as intangible and weightless, it only takes a few moments of reflection to realize that knowledge is inseparable from material conditions and there are restrictions to mobility. Also, it is common wisdom that significant scholarly achievements demand more than mere moving and networking. In construing career development relative to transnational mobility, it behooves us to acknowledge the embodied and situated character of scholarship and the role of profound commitments. In this aspect, place is a promising lens. To move beyond the limits of thought inscribed by ‘flows’ and ‘networks’ does not mean to dismiss the relevance of these metaphors. My upholding place as a theoretical lens does not exclude but puts constraints on flows and networks and invites other metaphors to the scene.

Place as a bottom-up approach: Addressing the world at multiple layers and scales

Place is not an objective space but one that is socially configured for human activities. Places ‘do not exist a priori but are produced by ongoing human social practices and experiences with the material world’ (Halperin, 2014: 111). Thus, place is not only a physical setting but can be a product of imagination as well. For example, the nation-state as an imaginary can serve as a reference point for personal experiences of place, which is seen in Phan’s depiction of her being a mobile scholar: ‘[W]hile the feeling of being a “global” citizen frees me from any national affiliations, it makes me float. And as I am floating I see myself closer to Vietnam, at least to a sense of this place with a language, history and culture to which I feel I belong’ (Phan, 2011: 107).

Agnew, writing from the field of human geography, provided the following distinction between space and place:

Space then signifies a field of practice or area in which a group or organization, such as a state, operates, held together in popular consciousness by a map-image and a narrative that represents it as a meaningful whole. Place represents the encounter of people with other people and things in space. It refers to how everyday life is inscribed in space and takes on meaning for people and organizations. Space is thus ‘top-down’, defined by powerful actors imposing their control and narratives on others. Place is the ‘bottom-up’, representing the outlooks and actions of more typical folk. (Agnew, 2005: 84)

The distinction is applicable to this study. Place is not separated from space. It is a spatial research approach. At the same time, place is the opposite of space. It is a bottom-up approach that foregrounds the specificities of practice and experience. Individuals not only experience but also practice place, which involves navigating established social arrangements. As a theoretical lens, place shines a light on the practices, processes and structures persistent in contemporary situations, the failure to attend to which ‘ensures that a transformative politics is not within reach’ (Hinkson, 2017: 52). Place, in human geography, has also been used to highlight moments of affect and fields of emotion. By contrast, a prevailing strand of research on academic mobility, in looking at the phenomenon with concepts of capitalism, translates people’s experience in abstract terms such as capital, skill improvement, brain circulation, brain drain, brain gain, etc. (e.g. Kim, 2010; Lee and Kim, 2010; Ortiga et al., 2018). These terms isolate the mind from the body (Metcalfe, 2017). In that context, place intervenes to make room for ‘the flesh’. Place appreciates fleeting moments, tiny details of the physical interplay between humans and non-humans that have nothing to do with social reproduction. Place is not only that which is studied but also a theoretical approach that foregrounds the capacity of addressing the world at multiple layers and scales.

In accordance with the spatial approach of place, mobility and place either constitute or erase each other. We can see people move within a place, and the place would not be that specific place without the movement. Halperin, when studying circulation as placemaking, mentioned the fact that sacred Australian Aboriginal places ‘are embodied by both ritual practitioners who travel along the ritual pathways and nonritual practitioners whose bodily movements must actively avoid such pathways and locales’ (Halperin, 2014: 112). Similarly, Europe and the United States (US), where I respectively followed a master’s degree program and a PhD program, are places through the ways they attract, allow and restrict movements. As a Vietnamese, to enter these places, I must have a valid passport with an appropriate visa, which is only feasible after meeting very strict and complicated requirements. Apart from the occurrence of place within short-lived experience, places can be stable entities that have exclusionary effects. They differentiate between ‘us’ (the people who belong in a place) and ‘them’ (the people who do not). It has been contended that a strong connection between people and place, where place provides a basis for identity, is tenable only in conditions of low mobility and rare confrontations with others (Bielewska and Jaskułowski, 2017). It makes sense to say that hypermobility can erase the sense of place, but hypermobility itself is an extreme state. Nevertheless, that many places are becoming more similar to each other is observable and troubling. This signifies the shadow of an imperialist frame of sense making that may impoverish experience.

The transnational is distinguished from the global for they are spatially different. Globalization assumes a core from which things spread whereas transnationality locates particular sites. The transnational is ‘constitutive of the center and periphery, across multiple spatialities and temporalities’ and hence offers a comparative frame for scholarship (Duong, 2015: 233). In this paper, I argue that the transnational can also happen vertically in negotiating layers of experience and discourses that gather at a place. I prefer the term ‘transnationality’ to ‘transnationalism’ as I aim to highlight locality rather than global connectivity and the recession of the nation-state. Transnationality still refers to the phenomenon of crossing national borders; however, from my perspective, it presents not a matter of acting at a geographic scale larger than that of nation-states but a situation that summons the capacity to address the world at multiple layers and scales in resistance to placelessness. To characterize transnational experience with the theoretical lens of place, I will use an array of related metaphors such as gravity, grounded, navigating, inhabiting, dwelling, growing, cultivation, etc.

Existential commitment

This study joins the strand of research that explores the relevance of locality in transnational lives. Some studies have analyzed the construction of a close and private home while others are interested in forms of place attachment and placemaking at multiple scales (Bielewska and Jaskułowski, 2017). Indeed, most studies use the notion of ‘belonging’ to discuss place attachment and identity formation. Among a few studies of the role of place in transnational scholarship, Phan (2011: 106) revealed that a sense of belonging to Vietnam shaped her research pursuits, particularly her ‘endeavours to introduce more “Eastern” knowledge and philosophies to the “West”’. ‘Belonging’ presupposes a place with which a person feels at ease. For me, life is usually more difficult. Belonging is a rare achievement fortunately gained at times in the process of inhabiting a place.

There has been a decision-making approach to mobility and place that explains highly skilled professionals’ going abroad, returning to, and working in their home country as a rational decision after weighing the considerations for and against the available options (e.g. Achenbach, 2017; Chen, 2017). I do not deny that rational calculations usually play a role in deciding where I am, but rationality fails to describe my mode of relating to ‘a place for me’. A place is only a place for me when I am passional towards it. I observe that when scholars say they stay in a place because ‘the impact of my work would be greater here than there’ (Bedenlier, 2018: 378), they provide a particular assessment rather than describing a mode of emplacement based on rationality.

This study theorizes and exemplifies a mode of emplacement that I term ‘existential commitment’. It is a mode of relation, of being and becoming oriented to the gravity and immediacy of place. It refers to a whole surrender, an acceptance to stay in and reconfigure an existing place. It says, ‘I take care of you’. In acting upon the commitment, ‘I’ transforms the set of conditions between ‘you’ and ‘me’. Needless to say, this gives rise to practices and identities. In the context of mobility, existential commitment operates within the dynamics between displacement and emplacement. To understand the effects of transnational academic mobility on the evolvement of scholarship, existential commitment should be examined along a career trajectory. Based on my limited experience, my work explores issues such as the nation building framework for transnational mobility, self-formation, and community cultivation. I call special attention to the cultivation of a small, immediate scholarly community as a distinct form of scholarship in the global periphery. My emphasis is not on how I bring a certain body of knowledge from the West to Vietnam and make it thrive. In my situation, the issue is how I could exist as a scholar in a place and how local academic practices can be a function of grounding the transnational.

Autoethnography

This study is a performance of autoethnography. Autoethnography, a subjectivist form of writing that synthesizes autobiography and cultural critique, emerged in the late twentieth century as a viable mode of academic inquiry as an outcome of the unrelenting postmodern and poststructuralist criticisms of the knowledge claims, representation practices, and dissemination effectiveness of traditional qualitative approaches (Grant et al., 2013). It explicitly challenges the exclusivity of supposedly objective, value-neutral, rationally-based practices in the study of social and cultural life. Viewing subjectivity as a resource for rather than as a threat to knowledge, the mode of inquiry brings in a first-person narrative voice that is prime for the ventures of this study: tracing a transnational trajectory and characterizing the embodied, feeling, culturally engaged and vulnerable nature of existential commitment.

Autoethnography poses the challenge of interlacing the narrative and the analytical. One works by setting up the scene, telling and letting things unfold and reveal themselves. The other often asks for clear thesis statements and explication, resisting linear chronological progression. The ethnographic gaze calls for descriptive details while the iterative process of reflection and reflexivity is not conducive to specificity and concreteness. Thus, no matter how I try to maintain a sense of coherence, for readers, my writing might wander, twist and turn unexpectedly—a common effect of the autoethnographic approach. It should also be noted that this paper follows the development of my scholarship. It should show what theories shape my scholarship and how they do that. Even when I attempt to offer detailed descriptions of events, the details may include fragments of theoretical explanation. In another direction, concrete details will appear without explicit conceptual analysis. I have presented the theoretical considerations that instruct my storytelling in the previous sections. I will add explicit theorization when perceiving a need for clarification or reflection. Overall, I engage in a kind of ‘weak’ theorizing. Instead of making claims to knowledge and understanding in a masterful fashion, I ‘stitch together theory, experience, and critique’ in a provisional manner (Jones, 2018: 6). Doing autoethnography is also risk-embracing as the researcher has to expose themselves. I deal with the vulnerabilities of myself and the relationships featured in my writing through careful selection of what to present.

Yearning to move: Places of attraction and subscription to a development agenda

To begin with, my going abroad for education was motivated by intense curiosity about what was going on in other places. This resonates with Kelley’s (2020) description of the fascination with a foreign society through which White men went abroad and became attracted to the profession of area studies. As a Vietnamese, however, I had to grapple with a different set of relations. I had dreamed of traveling to and sojourning in Europe and the US, the places that stood squarely as the centers of modern human civilization. I had also considered chances to study in another developing nation for a change of environment. Presented with two options of destination, a ‘developed’ country and a ‘developing’ one, I would choose the former since it evokes more otherness to my home country. My interest in the asymmetric relation did not equate to a thirst for upward mobility. The world offered me places of curiosity, and I wanted to relish the blessing instead of thinking much about improving my social status. In the 2000s, images of Europe and the US in the media were already abundant in Vietnam, yet I yearned for first-hand experience of the places. Because of the limited power of the Vietnamese passport and my limited financial resources, I could not travel to and live there easily. To fulfill my aspiration, I resorted to a grand narrative about the importance of transnational experience in nation building, which is predicated on an assumption about the uneven relationship between centers and peripheries of knowledge production. I did so by locating myself relative to different episodes of this grand narrative from the history of modern Vietnam. Let me delineate here some illustrative examples.

The first image that comes to my mind is Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), ¹ a striking case of making use of transnational experience to serve nation building. His heroic transnational itinerary started with a departure from Nha Rong Port in Saigon, Vietnam for Marseille, France in 1911. He was determined to figure out a way to save Vietnam from colonialism. This attempt at self-education through transnational experience later resulted in a formal educational endeavor. Nguyen Ai Quoc studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in the Soviet Union. He proposed a doctoral dissertation on land reforms in Southeast Asia but did not finish it (Le, 2017). Nguyen Khanh Toan, one of the most influential communist intellectual leaders of Vietnam, was the first Vietnamese to receive a doctoral degree from the university. By 1935, 45 Vietnamese students had graduated from university programs in politics in the Soviet Union (Le, 2017). After the declaration of independence in 1945, to build the nation in general and to develop a national system of education and academic institutions in particular, Ho Chi Minh’s government relied on transnational experience as accomplished through individual efforts, national policies, and international cooperation. Most of the founding figures of academic disciplines in the country were educated abroad in centers of knowledge production (Tran, 2010). Sending promising students and scholars abroad for education with the expectation that they would return to serve the nation building of Vietnam, which I hereafter refer to as the official development agenda, has set the terms for most government scholarships, both national and international. In the current age of globalization, the politics of socialism characteristic of the Cold War period has been replaced by a push for national economic development. The agenda operates in a landscape where the flow of people for education on a global scale has been made easier. The numbers of Vietnamese students abroad have been on the rise over time. According to a report by the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) to the Parliament on 18 October 2016, around 130,000 Vietnamese nationals were studying abroad, most of them were privately funded, and 5519 were funded by the MOET (Phuong, 2016). The academics selected for merit-based government scholarships, while attaining a sort of prestige, are easily understood as not rich enough to make it by themselves. Bilateral sponsorships often offer more resources than Vietnamese ones. Also, it is commonly presumed that the best students and scholars compete for scholarships offered by top universities in the world, not government scholarships. In a new context, the academics sponsored by the Vietnamese government no longer enjoy the same aura of prestige as their previous generations did. They are given the opportunity to exonerate themselves from their duty by paying back an amount of money corresponding to the scholarship they receive.

My own international scholarship is a product of this official development agenda. In 2006, for the first time, I was called a scholar. I became a BTC scholar as I was awarded a BTC scholarship to pursue a master’s degree program in educational studies in Belgium. BTC is an acronym for the Belgian development cooperation agency that supports developing countries in their fight against poverty. At the time, I had been a university lecturer for three years. No one had ever called me a scholar. After completing the program in Belgium, I returned to my home institution and worked there for four years. In 2011, I left Vietnam for my doctoral studies in curriculum studies in the US, which was enabled by a Vietnamese government fellowship. The government lent me 54,000 USD. I remember the number because it is the debt I owed and also what I listed as an achievement in my academic curriculum vitae (CV). Imitating the CVs written by American academics, my CV specified all the amounts of money I earned from grants, awards, and fellowships. When I told my adviser in the US PhD program that ‘scholarship’ meant an amount of money, she stopped talking to me for a while. She was encouraging me to do what I truly loved whereas I was saying that for me scholarship was a burden. While writing on a piece of paper to brainstorm with me some research ideas, she stopped and put the paper aside.

My embarking on these journeys was motivated by curiosity, and then I found myself shouldering the weight of poverty and debt. Along with the excitement of exploring new frontiers was an anxiety. Coming into a relationship with the official development agenda, I inhabit an existential commitment that entails difficult wrestling with freedoms and constraints so as to lead a creative and dignified life.

In the centers: Navigating identities and growing one’s scholarly self

I crossed borders to be in a different place, which I understood would result in new conditions for the various dimensions of my selfhood. This section engages with how dwelling in a center of knowledge production configures a person’s scholarly self and gives them academic identities. It reflects upon the workings of English, nationality, academic structures, and events of luck in transnational experience and academic integration.

English and nationality

Before coming to Belgium, I was educated entirely in Vietnam, trained to become a teacher of English. When I grew up, English had been attached to the prospect of employability. The language implies a foreign or international context of communication. The English textbooks in my secondary education featured English characters, Peter, Mary, Daisy, Mr. and Mrs. Green, Mr. Pike, Mrs. Young, etc. I had acquired some transcultural and transnational experience through learning English in Vietnam, which prepared me for the scholarship and the program I enrolled in at a prestigious university in Belgium. The program was taught in English, specifically designed for international students. All the students in the cohort were identified by their nationality. My one year in Belgium was brief. With respect to academic practices, I did not have any problems as a result of being labeled Vietnamese. However, there was one incident that left me in trauma.

I applied for a tourist visa to the United Kingdom (UK) and was rejected due to my failure to prove that I would return to Belgium and then to Vietnam after my planned trip. The application fee was high. I received no helpful instructions. I was subjected to the brutal assumption of guilt until proven innocent. I did not sign the decision paper, mistakenly rushed to the entrance door, and the sensor beeped loudly as it caught a rule violator.

During my five years in the US, I could observe how my identity as a Vietnamese strongly influenced what I was expected to do. I did not enjoy the idea that a Vietnamese scholar should be dedicated to studying the Vietnamese, especially when it is imposed by non-Vietnamese. I felt uncomfortable when people asked me to speak about and for Vietnam and as a representative of Vietnam. For me, being Vietnamese is deeply personal. It does not lend itself to easy language for the sake of smooth exchange. Moreover, I had exerted enormous efforts to study English to the extent that it limited my knowledge about Vietnam and my capacity to speak about it. I found myself caught up in a frustrating double deficiency. Nonetheless, in both programs, I found myself equal to others in terms of English. There was a fundamental change in how I was related to English. In Vietnam, I approached English as a learner of a foreign language. In pursuing academic studies in English, I was not treated as an inferior English speaker right in the conceptual framework. I was a scholar who used English, so my relationship with my academic pursuits mattered more. I harvested good academic results and encountered scholarly language that transformed me in ways I really liked. How could I ask for more?

My adviser and the Critical Studies Reading Group

For many years, my intellectual interest was the phenomenon of creativity. It was originally cultivated in Vietnam. In the US, my approach to creativity studies was transformed as I met my adviser, a Foucault scholar. She spoke a Foucaudian language in her everyday life and had written an exquisitely beautiful book to introduce Foucault, where concepts and theories become clear, simple, friendly and helpful while maintaining charm, complexity, criticality, and vulnerability. Thanks to my adviser, I successfully incorporated a Foucauldian perspective into my repertoire of sense making. Foucault has helped me examine and challenge the conditions of possibility and intelligibility, form the habit of not taking things for granted, and attend to the task of self-invention.

I even adopted an idol scholar after my first month in the US. My adviser invited me to join her Critical Studies Reading Group, where interested PhD students met every Friday to discuss critical texts. That afternoon, in the first meeting of the academic year, people were discussing Bingham et al.,’s (2010) Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation. I kept quiet and listened to the speakers. Rancière’s characterization of equality hit me hard. In educational discourses, we have heard of ‘equal rights’, ‘equal opportunities’, ‘equal inputs’, and ‘equal outcomes’; Rancière reminds us that the notion of equality as the same quantity/quality makes inequality inevitable, even overwhelming. Equality as such has become a goal projected into the future, an ideal state that never comes and perhaps, in many circumstances, should not. Equality specific to Rancière is an assumption to be postulated and verified. Once equality is postulated, it alters how we think and see every aspect of life. It is beyond my words to describe how liberating it felt to meet Rancière. Reading more works on and by him, I became infatuated with his scholarship. I expressed my enthusiasm for Rancière unabashedly everywhere I went. My first published article is a critique of the discourse of discipline-based arts education in the US from Rancière’s aesthetics. A friend nicknamed me ‘Mrs. Rancière’.

I had not perceived the need to know clearly what I was and should become. Yet the moment I was called a scholar, I felt a click. Until now, I am still struggling in adopting the identity, but part of me surrendered in 2006. I accepted the identity and worked on myself as a scholar. This effort was stronger during my doctoral studies, where I was repeatedly asked to describe my scholarly self. From the encounters with my adviser and the Critical Studies Reading Group, I confidently identified as a critical theorist who followed the tradition of scholarship exemplified by Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière.

Research associations and conferences

I did not identify with the so called ‘American scholarly community’ since it was too diverse to be helpful for identification. I regularly presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The world’s largest gathering of education researchers, the conference hosts around ten thousand participants every year. AERA’s system of Divisions and special interest groups (SIGs) provide means of identification for educational researchers. I submitted my proposals to Division B because it welcomes theoretical and philosophical research. Division B represents curriculum studies, a scholarly area that is more broadly defined than others. I also found a place in the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). I presented at its annual meetings and was a member of the Post-foundational Approach (PfA) SIG.

The AERA Division B and CIES PfA SIG sponsor graduate student seminars and mentoring activities for emerging scholars and junior faculty members. They facilitate ongoing communications among members throughout the year. AERA and CIES are more than American; they are powerhouses of global educational research. Within such large spaces, academic identities are predicated on abstract categories that differentiate research areas and paradigms. I had no difficulty in distinguishing between instances of positivism, constructivism, feminism, queer theory, neo-Marxism, Foucault, new materialism, and so on.

In my last year, I started attending smaller conferences, the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice in Dayton, Ohio and the Curriculum Studies Summer Collaborative in Savannah, Georgia. My adviser associated more with European scholars and went to conferences in Europe, which I could not afford due to my limited stipend.

The conferences gave me more than academic knowledge. Hosting participants from many cultures, every CIES annual meeting was a celebration of colors and voices and always made me feel alive. From traveling to conference sites, I discovered a favorite city. That spring, the CIES meeting was held in Vancouver, Canada. I could recall the cherry blossoms, people’s smiles on the streets, and how I absentmindedly left my backpack at a train station and could later retrieve it. The place gently dropped petals of its generosity into my soul.

Classes and coursework

As a body displaced from Vietnam, my sense of pain was awakened as I resettled in the US, not from loss of connections with Vietnam but from the materiality of what was going on in the new places. Surprisingly, pain was most palpable as I attended the classes in my PhD program. Some encouraged students to do what they wanted for themselves. Others applied meticulous control so that all the students must study the prescribed materials and participate in class discussions. Sometimes it went as if I were forced to eat the dishes that I hated. The juxtaposition of contrasting approaches to education was at the same time enlightening and upsetting. I became physically sick. Pain helped me exert distance and resistance to certain practices.

Displacement

Although I did not have any plans to stay in Belgium or in the US after my graduation, being forced to leave each country each time was somewhat like a tree being uprooted. The displacement was violent and painful. I had known the deadline for my coming back, but I could not be sufficiently prepared. It was difficult to browse through my belongings and decide which to abandon and which to bring along. I was in a rush both times. I would not say I have ever had a sense of belonging to Belgium or the US. Yet there were these moments when I returned to my apartment after a long trip and felt like I was coming home. I resided in different houses during the years. My body was there, where chestnut trees shed their fruits, where a big oak tree in front of the building comforted me when I was crying, where before my eyes was an immense sparkling blanket of snow, where my roommate cooked for me and the cat stared at me.

Now I am in Vietnam. I miss the libraries, where I did not mind getting lost. Many people came in and out of the buildings, but I could still enjoy the comfort of being on my own and the music of silence, especially when slowly moving through the passages between parallel multilevel book stacks in search of books resonating with my curiosities. The libraries felt safe, glorious, and magical. In Vietnam, I do not know where the libraries of my university are. The titles in the catalogs, which are sometimes sent to my mailbox, do not match my interests.

Now I am in Vietnam. I have to repeat it again and again to interrupt my habits and expectations. I can no longer afford to travel to the conferences that I have been familiar with. There is no equivalent of Division B or PfA SIG. Few people know Foucault and Rancière. I have Internet access, exchange emails, and still receive manuscripts to review, but my international connections are weakened. After one year, I was appalled to find that I missed many of the deadlines for reviewing submissions for international journals and conferences.

I came back to my home institution, a university within Vietnam National University, Hanoi (VNUH). The circumstances brought me to a Division in charge of teaching subjects about English-speaking countries, primarily the UK and the US. Among the eight members of the Division, I had known seven, from brief encounters before I went to the US. Now they are there and would work closely with me for years.

Faculty members at my university are not given an office. I am supposed to work at home and come to the campus according to a schedule of teaching and other events. The distance from my house to the campus in Vietnam is approximately the same as that in the US. But the two paths are entirely different. In that small American town, the way to school was marked with trees changing their colors during the year. Buildings were sparsely located, so I could frequently enjoy panoramic views as I walked. The path to school in Hanoi is full of traffic. The air is thickened with traffic emissions and dust from construction sites. I wear a helmet and a mask and drive a Honda Wave Alpha motorbike to school.

In my first course, titled ‘Advanced Topics in American Studies: Education as Media and Media as Education’, I assigned students movies about education and organized class discussions based on the movies. I put forth critical issues through my selection of movies and questions for discussion. I only made a modest intervention into the popular format of a lesson: I did not give my students bullet points of learning objectives. Two-thirds of the semester had passed, and most of them could not see the points of the lessons for themselves. I failed to relate to my students. While criticisms of neoliberal standardized curriculum mattered in my US academic circles, they appeared strange in my Vietnamese context.

When it came to evaluating students’ graduation research projects, I was traumatized when my students’ works were not understood for receiving my influence in framing the problem. Aware of the possibility of miscommunication, I had spent extra time helping my students articulate their research considerations. I had even explained some of the key points to my colleagues in my emails to them. I overworked myself to no avail. Despite my colleagues’ good will, I was lonely. But I was also patient and hopeful.

The returnee’s work

Labor conditions and the research–teaching dichotomy

It is said that Vietnam is performing an ‘economic miracle’ (Vanham, 2018). In fact, from one of the poorest nations in the world, Vietnam has grown to become a low middle-income country with an increasing disparity between the rich and the poor. In this context of economic development, the landscape of higher education (HE) in Vietnam is changing. Government and bilateral sponsorship programs for academics to obtain graduate degrees overseas have improved academic qualifications of faculty members, though ‘it remains the case that over three-quarters of all faculty members do not yet have a doctoral qualification’ (MOET, 2017, cited in Pham and Haden, 2019: 27). The ongoing stratification of universities has led to the stratification of labor conditions in the academic profession. Nonetheless, it is not a hasty generalization to say that the majority of Vietnamese faculty members are working in a situation of material and symbolic dearth while supposed to be productive in teaching, research and other scholarly activities. Due to low salaries, my colleagues in the Division, most of whom are in their thirties and have not earned a PhD degree, have to juggle multiple jobs inside and outside academia. I would not say the situation is typical of academics at VNUH, a leading multidisciplinary state university in Vietnam to which my university belongs. Yet it is common for Vietnamese university lecturers to not spend substantial time on research and publication. A priority of current HE reform is to impose the pressure of publishing on academic staff. Annual staff appraisals in my university include calculating a research score for every lecturer based on the numbers of their scholarly publications. International publications are given more weight. Low productivity in research is diagnosed as one of the main problems of HE in Vietnam. In Vietnam, the responsibility for research has been traditionally assigned to specialized, mono-disciplinary public research institutes; universities could do research and have conducted significant research projects, but research was not their primary mission. In 2012, the Higher Education Law proclaimed Vietnam’s need to create a multi-tiered greater education sector with top-tier research-intensive universities. At least 20 major Vietnamese public universities are striving to become ‘world-class’ (Pham and Haden, 2019). These institutions’ mechanisms to boost research productivity include schemes to provide financial and other benefits for faculty members who publish in peer-reviewed international journals. Researchers from the natural and applied sciences generally perform much better than those in the humanities and social sciences in such research publications (Pham and Haden, 2019). Among the universities within VNUH, my institution is considered a low-level performer in terms of research productivity.

Scholarship is a diverse category. In many contexts, it can be distinguished from research and teaching. However, if scholarship is understood as knowledge production at HE institutions, it includes two main components: research; and teaching. In the currently dominant frame of reference, research is more valued to the extent that it defines the creative nature of scholarship and teaching is about getting across what has been known. Vietnam’s adoption of this configuration, while aiming to bridge the gap in the global divide of knowledge production and consumption, reinforces the superiority of Western centers of knowledge, which have always been the leaders in research and innovation. The formulation of the dichotomy itself is problematic. It views knowledge as hierarchical and transferable. It positions research and teaching in a normative, generalizable and static relationship that disfavors teaching. The relationship between research and teaching is indeed dynamic and context-driven. If knowledge is a process of challenge and engagement, then research and teaching merge. The dichotomy also obscures what is crucial about scholarship: participating in and building academic communities. Conditions for teaching and research, the existence and operation of relevant communities of practice, are not given but created through scholarly work. Boosting research productivity might be a pertinent development strategy, but it is not the same as caring about meaningful inquiries and the wellbeing of human lives.

The obligation of coming back to Vietnam in the official development agenda implies that a returnee should not only produce international research publications under the name of Vietnam but also help build Vietnam-based scholarly communities. However, in the current discursive sphere, the priority on international peer-reviewed publications suppresses consideration for Vietnam-based community building, and frames the latter as a means to achieve the former, or at least evaluates it against the former. In my university, very limited funding and recognition are allocated to professional development activities whereas remarkable financial rewards and prestige are given to international peer-reviewed publications. Due to low output in international publications, the total spending on research and development is modest, but the symbolic capital given to research is obviously much greater.

Fortunately, endeavors to enrich the curriculum and teaching have not been stifled. My involvement in academic community building activities started from what was happening at my home institution rather than my own ideas. During the four years between my return from Belgium and my leaving for the US, from 2007 to 2011, I undertook the challenge of forming a community of instructors of a new set of courses on academic development, namely ‘College Success, Critical Thinking, and Research Methodologies’. Within this essay, however, I will concentrate on what I have been doing with respect to community building since my return from the US.

Gravity, equality, and self-care

Despite the poor income from my position, I rarely accept extra jobs. I have accumulated knowledge from central fields, been educated for research and international publication, and want to participate in the global community of scholars. But I have decided to delay my efforts for international publication. More immediate and urgent is the task of relating to the people before me, my colleagues and students. They are here physically, having more weight than far-away prospects.

The priority also comes from my positionality as a scholar who commits to the Rancièrian principle of equality. I consider my colleagues and students as equal intellectuals and must act upon that. If my academic life were destined to reproduce inequality, my scholarly self would crumble to dust. In the new place, the failure to relate to my students and colleagues has been almost unbearable to me. I need to reinvent myself but also want to maintain the integrity of the mature and solid scholarly self I have developed.

I am personally inclined to interdependence rather than independence. How is it possible to exist without giving oneself to others and being accepted? I want to cultivate a community where I can be the scholar I want, where people meet and talk with each other, experiencing intellectual stimulation, satisfaction, and growth. The notion of ‘community of practice’ has been preeminent in the discourse on career development, yet it is to be reinvented with meanings from my experience and unfold as the community takes place. As head of the Division, I am in an advantageous position to initiate and organize activities to cultivate such community. In my mind, I insist that knowledge be mobilized and generated not in the manner of transferring expertise but that of engagement and gift giving. I understand that in our situation, the cultivation of a community as such would be characterized by what I term ‘outperformance’—efforts and achievements out of symbolic and material dearth.

Outperformance and place-based community

In growing the community, we have gathered around our common cause of curriculum development and teaching. Most notedly, the Division has been tackling the task of establishing a specialization of international studies for English majors with courses on themes including globalization, global governance, US foreign policies, cultural citizenship and overseas communities, migration in the contemporary era, etc. We all have had international experience, but none of us had been trained in the academic field named ‘international studies’; four of us have an education background in applied linguistics and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). The others have a degree in education and development, American studies, and cultural studies. I am the only PhD degree holder. My scholarship in critical humanities provides with me a background to fathom the issues. Nevertheless, moving from educational research to international studies requires me to learn new things.

Our monthly salaries range from approximately six million VND (250 USD) to nine million VND (390 USD). In Hanoi, 250 USD is only enough for frugal living without any dependents. The funding for the task follows our university’s regular regulations of financial allocation for curriculum and professional development. Three million VND (around 130 USD) is given to establishing a new course and one million VND (45 USD) for a professional development session where the speaker has a PhD degree.

On the basis of these conditions, one might think what is possible would be ‘cheap’, of ‘low quality’. At the beginning, my colleagues did not trust that we could design and implement a decent program. I was also overwhelmed by ‘the impossible mission’. Administratively, we had to accept the task, but from a bottom-up approach. It was possible not to do it genuinely by giving it little care and hence failing to attract any students. There would be no punishment for the failure. However, we have been devoted to the task, which I do not think is an outcome of rational calculations.

Previously, our English majors had specialized in either English language teacher education (TESOL) or translation and interpretation training. Specializations in administration sciences and in applied linguistics were added to the list of choices in 2012. International studies are the newest invention, fashioned out of the conditions of globalization. In international studies, with English, we scholars and students in Vietnam stand on the same global academic grounds. In the vision I shared with my colleagues, international studies are an open space for the members of the community to bring in their best. We develop in the direction of cultural studies rather than international relations. Grossberg’s description of cultural studies applies to our interpretation of international studies, ‘something that you make up as you go, as a project that reshapes itself in and attempts to respond to new conjunctures as problem-spaces’ (Grossberg, 2010: 1).

As an academic Division, we can make all the important decisions about the curriculum and professional development activities, given that we do not ask for extra funding. During the last three years, we have arranged numerous meetings to make room for intellectual growth and in preparation for the new courses. The attendants gather in Room 516, Building B2. The office area for our faculty is on the fifth floor. There are only four rooms, one for the Dean, one for the ViceDean, one for the faculty office, and one meeting room, Room 516. There is no elevator, so I do not have to wonder whether to use the elevator or to climb the stairs as I did in the US. The rule here is to install an elevator only if the building has at least six floors. The secretary of the faculty office and the Dean plant small gardens in front of their rooms. I do not know what specific plants are there since I am usually in a state of hurry. At times, roses caught my eye.

Our Division’s talks and discussions on scholarly topics are usually open to all who are interested. Announcements are posted on our Facebook page. I have friends who share my interests. My colleagues and students also invite people to the meetings through their connections. I have the joy of looking at the people in the room and sometimes seeing new faces. Travelling in the polluted air of Hanoi to a venue that is off the radar of many involves much effort, so I have always tried my best to make sure that the substance we engage with in each meeting is rich and stimulating. We listen to each other, ask for clarification, and offer constructive comments. There have been heated debates where voices were raised louder than usual, for example, on the meanings of neoliberalism and the possible rightness of evolutionary thinking. There were other moments where all the people in the room looked at each other in confusion, for instance, at how financial systems in the US work. When my former adviser visited Vietnam, she also came to Room 516, contributing a series of talks I introduced to the public with the title ‘Historicizing Critiques in Education and Research’.

We are in the room, sharing one physical setting. The space is enough for around 30 people. Of the two air-conditioners, one does not work. There are three electric sockets. If you want to charge your laptop and insert the plug into one of them, the circuit breaker might interrupt the electric current unexpectedly and the projector will turn off. There appears to be nothing fancy in the room. But we prefer face-to-face meetings to online conferences with Skype or Zoom. There was one moment when I realized that all of the friends who I hold dearest to my heart gathered in one same place. It is an incredible achievement for me.

The community is fragile, which is at least how I feel about it. If I leave this place, would these people gather here anymore? Or will they gradually leave me while I remain here? Some of the frequent participants have gone abroad to further their formal education. Sometimes more than half of the Division are absent because they have other jobs to do.

The international studies specialization for English majors has been in operation since fall 2017. The first cohort of students graduated in July 2019. A colleague and I went to the commencement ceremony and took photographs of them. We selected the one with the most members to post on our Facebook page. As I looked at the photograph, I could not help asking why the photograph could give me so much joy. The students promised to come back in November, at our faculty’s celebration of its 10th birthday. The university is a place to leave from rather than one to return to. The promise to come back was moving.

My reflections on community cultivation as a form of scholarship have started with two interests: knowledge production in the periphery; and the phenomenon of transnationality. On the former, I have observed various forms of advocating for ‘local knowledge’. One is to struggle to trace the original place of a floating body of knowledge. Another is to create knowledge that travels internationally with a local name. From my experience, it can be seen that knowledge mobilization and generation in the global periphery may happen in place-based communities, in attending to the local lives as intellectual lives, to the intimacy and fragility of knowledge encounters, and to the power to think and act differently. The knowledge that vibrates within the place might not be recognized by those who do not participate in the community. However, it is the life of the community at the place that matters. Furthermore, it leaves traces in the physical human bodies that later travel to other places. This form of knowledge production has taken place since ancient times. I argue that it remains relevant in the current context. It is much needed if we do not want to be consumed by the terms of grand narratives. Moving back and forth between different frames and scales of addressing the world is crucial for navigating contemporary society.

Concluding remarks: Grounded transnationality and being in place differently

By foregrounding my personal experience and career trajectory, this study has rendered scholarship, usually defined by abstract categories of problem and paradigm, visible as cultural, political, ethical and personal entanglements. In that aspect, this study echoes the tone of struggle found in other stories of transnational returnees in this Special Issue (Karakaş, 2020; Nonaka, 2020; Phan and Mohamad, 2020). This study’s peculiar contribution is the light it has shed on how groundedness results from the dynamics between displacement and emplacement in transnational mobility. From grounded positionalities, my scholarship has emerged and evolved. My groundedness is experienced and practiced through existential commitment, a mode of emplacement implying my surrender to the gravity of place. On the one hand, the transnational involves inhabiting different places spanning across nation-states. On the other hand, the primacy of place is ‘that of being an event capable of implacing things in many complex manners and to many complex effects—an issue of being in place differently, experiencing its eventfulness otherwise’ (Casey, 1997/2013: 337). In light of ‘being in place differently’, I have brought into view a distinct form of scholarship that I have engaged in a periphery of knowledge production. The form of scholarship is characterized by outperformance—making efforts and achievements out of material and symbolic dearth, by the formation and cultivation of a small intellectual community where people gather in a spirit of freedom and with intimate relations. I came back to Vietnam, within a development agenda subjecting scholars to obligations of nation-building through transnational experience and global competition. I do not think that this is the end of transnationality. Rather, it is an important part of transnationality. Transnationality is less about spanning across nation-states with flattened relations than about increasing the depth of our experience. It involves grappling with the weight of layers of experience and different frames and scales of addressing the world. The transnational is almost void without its groundedness. An instance of its groundedness is being entirely present with a small group of people.