Moving Through Space, Pausing In Place: Vietnamese Doctoral Sojourners’ Transnational Experiences of Identity (Re)Negotiation, Sense of Belonging, and Sense of Home

Abstract

For the past decades, an increasing number of international students have travelled overseas to study for their doctoral degrees. Vietnamese doctoral students have actively joined this international education-migration flow. As they are a highly mobile group, their sequential movement involves a wide variety of migration plans that are engineered based on their relationships with significant others in both the host and home countries, as well as their professional prospects and personal circumstances. This thesis unpacks the lived experiences of 19 Vietnamese doctoral students while crossing borders for their academic pursuits; their shifting sense of belonging, sense of home, and identity; as well as their post-PhD mobility and migration projects. Informed by four theoretical turns in transnationalism, space, mobility, and imagination, this phenomenological study portrays the transnational experiences of the doctoral students and graduates at multiple points in time: pre-, during-, and post-doctoral studies. While imagination theory primarily aids exploration of the ‘why’ of Vietnamese doctoral students’ sojourns, spatial and transnational theories illuminate the ‘how’ during their sojourns, and mobility and spatial theories shed light on the ‘where’ of their post-sojourn choices. Throughout the thesis, I explore how Vietnamese PhD students made sense of place, and how their sense of home and belonging were informed by their own articulations of themselves as mobile subjects in the host countries. These narratives were crosscut by factors such as aspirations, imaginative geographies, and the vicissitudes of negotiating social and cultural differences in different places. The thesis extends the scholarship on international education and transmigration, including imagination, mobility and immobility, in-betweenness, and temporariness and permanence. It presents how the PhD students’ experiences went beyond individualised phenomena of academic adjustment or acculturation to experiences of space, place, home and belonging through critical geographies of transnational spaces. It advances literature on how international PhD study disrupts and complicates post-graduation mobility and possible migration plans. The study calls for further development of the transnational approaches in post-doctoral mobility schemes to recognise the multi-scalar influences – from personal dimensions to national and global perspectives – on the future mobility of this highly skilled group of transmigrants.