Immobility in Mobility during COVID-19: Reflections on 'Being Stuck' in the Home Country of an International Doctoral Student

While international education has long been characterised by mobility, the Covid-19 pandemic has shifted our attention to immobility as thousands of international students have experienced immobility in various ways, one of which is being stuck in their home countries. This paper records how such immobility entailed the feeling of confusion and detachment in an international doctoral student and her efforts to overcome physical immobility by making use of digital mobility. Through the sensemaking framework, this paper not only illuminates the consequences of disrupted mobility on an international doctoral student’s academic learning and sense of belonging but also highlights the student’ agency, which then offers a research area that may yield interesting insights in this unprecedented time of uncertainty

‘Under the magnolia tree, our youth’: an autoethnography on friendship and sisterhood among female international doctoral students in New Zealand

This paper demonstrates how my friendship with three other female Vietnamese doctoral students in New Zealand grew into an ‘academic sisterhood’ which was forged as an emplaced form of sociality that encouraged solidarity among us. As four female Vietnamese PhD students in New Zealand who shared intersecting identities as Vietnamese temporary migrants, women, mothers, and PhD students, we provided support for and learned from each other. The sisterhood strengthened my sense of belonging to both my home and host countries, and created a learning space for myself. I argue that the academic sisterhood was far more complexly imagined and meaningful than simple bonding networks of co-ethnic friendships, embracing the mixed emplaced and transnational nature of my friendship

‘Dear Epsom’: a poetic autoethnography on campus as home of an international doctoral student in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article delineates my place attachment and sense of home in my Epsom campus, University of Auckland, in Aotearoa New Zealand, where I studied for my PhD in two periods of time: during the first year of my PhD programme, when my sense of home was established; and when I returned to Vietnam for my six-month research trip and was stranded due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to my sense of home in my campus being weakened and disrupted. Using poetic autoethnography as the methodology, I recount my personal experiences of how I grew attached to my university campus as a physical place, and social spaces of cultural diversity, friendship, and academic and PhD student identity development. The article offers an analysis of my unique emotional experience of being on and off campus involuntarily, which is hardly found in extant literature on international student mobility and students’ lived experiences

Too black to be <i>The Little Mermaid</i> ? Backlash against Disney’s 2023 <i>The Little Mermaid</i> – continuity of racism, white skin preference and hate content in Vietnam

When it was released globally and in Vietnam in May 2023, the live-action Disney movie The Little Mermaid was met with strong backlash online and boycotting in the Southeast Asian country. Negative reactions against the movie due to the casting of Halle Bailey, a Black actress for the titular role, a mermaid and princess of the ocean named Ariel, showed concerning signs of racism and sexism that stem from a preference for white skin and an emphasis on the importance of looks in women. This article seeks to understand such reactions through its discussion of cultural factors such as the issues of racism and white supremacy and how they intersect with a tendency to resist inclusive movements, the growing trend of hate content and sexist conception of beauty in Vietnam. The article suggests an intersectional approach and considers the concept “misogynoir” to explain the backlash against Halle Bailey’s starring in the movi

Reproduction propaganda: The state hails, citizens responds—A case study of Vietnamese governmental Facebook

Since the turn of the 21st century, aging populations and low fertility rates have alarmed governments across Europe and East Asia. The Communist state of Vietnam is now experiencing the same situation. The government has recently started a propaganda campaign to encourage its citizens to not postpone marriage and having children. This article explores one recent attempt—a viral post published on the government's Facebook page in November 2023 urging young citizens to marry before 30, attracting hundreds of thousands of reactions and comments. The article examines this heteronormative message and netizens’ comments, which show humor, resistance, and critiques of the government's welfare system. Using the concepts of (counter-) interpellation, it reveals the nuances of the power relations between the state and its people in this case study where biopolitics and personal choice intersect, illuminating how social networks provide a discursive space for mundane political engagement

Gender Stereotypes As Hidden Curriculum: A Case of Vietnamese English Textbooks

Gender equality and women empowerment have become a buzzword for development during the past decades with numerous national and international policies, including educational policies. However, gender equality is normally conceptualized in quantitative terms of education such as low disparity in access to education between boys and girls while qualitative aspects of gender equality are still left uncontested, among which is gender stereotypes in hidden curriculum. Gender stereotypes as a social construct, once imbedded in education and educational materials, certainly intervene the gender socialization process of students. The paper attempts to investigate this issue by employing a mixed qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the illustrations in English textbooks for Upper-secondary students in Vietnam. The analysis reveales stereotypes reflected in three main areas: occupations, sports and pastimes, and life duties, all of which confirm social and cultural norms of Vietnamese society towards a woman

Online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic: Vietnamese language teachers’ emotions, regulation strategies and institutional policy and management

Teaching is often described as one of the most emotion-laden professions. In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conversion to online teaching has triggered new emotional experiences of teachers that not many studies have taken into account. Studying emotion from a poststructuralist lens, this study examines the emotional experiences of 10 language teachers in a university in Vietnam and their responses to the new teaching platforms. Analysis of the in-depth semi-structured interviews shows that the pedagogically and technologically distinctive features of online teaching aroused unique challenges for and emotions of the teachers, both positive and negative. Also, the teachers reported a number of strategies to cope with the new situation which we term as in-the-moment and out-of-class emotion regulation. The study highlights the need for acknowledgment and support for teachers in terms of resources, policy and management of institutions in the “new normal situation,” while displaying teachers’ self-reliance and emotional self-regulation. The article calls for attention to teachers emotion as an integral dimension of the profession, regardless of the physical or virtual setting of the classroom

Countering stuckness: international doctoral students' experiences of disrupted mobility amidst COVID-19

The paper, through the lens of positioning and agency theories, examines the experiences of being stranded in the home country due to the restricted mobility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic of 10 international doctoral students of different nationalities (Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Indian), majoring in different disciplines (Education, Linguistics, Applied linguistics, Economics, Public health, and Civil engineering), and studying in different countries (New Zealand, Australia, and the United States). With an aim to explore the abrupt immobility and its subsequent impacts on the students’ learning, the article highlights the challenges that the students had to tackle including the feelings of being in limbo, nostalgia, and detachment, and faced with academic challenges due to the physical distance from the study destination. Accordingly, they had to self-position and reposition themselves and enact different forms of agency to confront the difficulties, including agency for becoming, needs-response agency, and agency as struggle and resistance. The findings highlight how the international PhD students mobilized resources to develop their independence as future researchers, as well as their connection with the academic communities in their home countries in various ways