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.

Transnational identity: The struggles of being and becoming a Japanese female professor in a neo-kokusaikaphase of Japan

“…This is to me the latest and most sound (re)interpretation of kokusaika phenomenon in relation to my “embeddedness” (cf. Karakaş, 2020, this Special Issue) or my “grounded transnational” self through the process of “existential commitment” as coined by Phung (2020, this Special Issue).…”

Emotion labor and affect in transnational encounters: Insights from Western-trained TESOL professionals in Saudi Arabia

“…His painful adaption to the teaching situation in his Saudi university is another display of emotion(al) labor. It corresponds to the insider–outsider, local–global, Global North–Global South emotion(al) discourses which are felt, consumed, resented, encountered, and put up with by many transnationally trained scholars/academics/teachers discussed in this Special Issue (see Karakas, 2020; Nonaka, 2020; Phan and Mohamad, 2020; Phung, 2020; Windle, 2020).…”

The making and transforming of a transnational in dialog: Confronting dichotomous thinking in knowledge production, identity formation, and pedagogy

“…The pain endured by Azmi’s very transnational positionality is nothing like the dominant romantic and cosmopolitan narrative about transnational academic mobilities. It also correlates with the transnational experiences that Phung (2020, this Special Issue) reveals and engages with. This pain is real, physically, emotionally, mentally, and intellectually, as Azmi further asserted in his face-to-face interviews with Le-Ha.…”

“…Alemu (2019) highlights the under-discussed problem of mobile academics struggling to reconcile domestic contexts with foreign academic experiences, which subsequently affects their academic performance at home. Specifically, some mobile academics find it difficult to integrate themselves into the host environment and consequently remain “foreign” (Alemu, 2019; Karakas, 2020 (this Special Issue); Phung, 2020 (this Special Issue)). Mobile academics have also experienced restrictions imposed on them by their countries of origin in what they can research and reveal to the public (Karakas, 2020 (this Special Issue)).…”

“…Commenting on the above entry, Azmi referred to his homecoming experience after living outside for over 10 years as “reverse culture shock,” which is defined as “the process of readjusting, reacculturating, and reassimilating into one’s own home culture” (Gaw, 2000: 83–84). Returning scholars/academics typically face many issues including academic problems and identity conflicts, in addition to a wide range of tense emotions such as stress, anger, displacement, loss, disillusion, frustration, and depression (Chen, 2017; Gaw, 2000; Karakas, 2020 (this Special Issue); Phung, 2020 (this Special Issue)). What we would like to argue further here is that these emotions and experiences as expressed by transnational returnees result from the very dichotomous representation and projection of the global/transnational versus the local/home that they themselves also entertain and circulate in their own identification, research, pedagogy, and teaching (also cf.…”