Mobility as Rhizome and Becoming: Experiences of Vietnamese Women in Crossing Borders to do Doctorates

Rhizome

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) differentiate rhizomes from trees, in that the roots of rhizomes spread transversely, with one node connecting to another in a non-linear and non-hierarchical way. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, the principles of connection and heterogeneity of rhizomes are that: “any point of rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree root, which plots a point, fixes an order” (p. 7). Thus, rhizomes are forms of being (or, rather, becoming) that are in constant movement and accumulation rather than stability and definition (Grellier, 2013). Rhizomes allow us to examine mobility via nodes with their connection and movement that span across multiple scales. As transnational perspectives have suggested, the mobility of many international students is historically and culturally connected to the hegemonic global north. Rhizomes at the same time allow us to explore the connection of mobility to the contemporary globalization of neoliberal market regimes in higher education and to other social and political contexts in which the mobile Vietnamese women found themselves.

Becoming

Like the rhizome, becoming is another key concept from Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of immanence. Becoming captures the movement and dynamism of any form of being as always in process, and is particularly oriented against the idea of linear development (Renold & Ringrose, 2011). As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write:

Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing,” “being,” “equaling,” or “producing.” (p. 239)

Any analysis of the becoming of mobility needs to embrace macro- and micropower relations in the social, which Deleuze and Guattari (1987) understand through the concepts of the molar and molecular. Molar lines work as planes of organization, regulating, defining, and homogenizing things through molar structures of, for instance, gender, race, and/or identity categories (Jackson, 2013). Molecular lines are tiny or singular processes or movements, in that “becoming-molecular undermines the great molar powers” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 233). Examining the becoming of mobility requires us to highlight how the historical past intersects with contemporary social, economic, and educational conditions in the Vietnamese and Australian higher education sectors to regulate Vietnamese women and their mobility through molar structures (identity categories) such as gender, race and other categories. Examining the becoming of mobility also requires us to draw attention to how the women and mobility encounter, disrupt, or rework these identity categories through molecular lines, such that mobility itself is never simply the becoming of being mobile or simply the condition of having produced movement, but is understood as a process always evolving in and of itself. What we intend to demonstrate is that the women are never finally determined by molar or molecular lines of mobility, but remain always “in-process,” drawn between, for example, structures of gender and their capacity to resist these, always becoming mobile and never having finally arrived.

Node A: The Family Woman

The node of the family woman connects with nodes of gender norms and life and studies in Australia (see below) which operate simultaneously as molar lines that produce these participants as particular types of women, but also create opportunities for escape from traditional gender roles. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 213) write about the simultaneity between the molar and molecular lines: “Every society, and every individual, are thus plied by both segmentarities simultaneously: one molar, the other molecular … If they are inseparable, it is because they coexist and cross over into each other.” Of interest are the ways that being a mother and wife created opportunities to make the decision to become mobile and undertake doctoral studies. The women in our study recalled many experiences associated with what it meant to be a “family woman” that contributed to their decisions to undertake doctorates in Australia.

As family women, children played an important role in their decision-making process, even for women who were not yet mothers. For example, Sa describes how:

As a woman, we need to sacrifice work for family, but I was kind of stubborn and should have had children right after completing my master's degree. At that time, I thought I should continue with a PhD rather than having children because I am sure I would never be able to do a PhD when raising young children. So, I continued with a PhD and thought that my children would be able to stay in Australia, not in Vietnam or Korea. Korea is also good but I do not want my children to learn three languages at the same time because they really need English.

In this instance, we see how the decision to undertake a PhD in Australia was made possible by the woman's hope for a better education and a future for the children she does not yet have. Nhung is more explicit about doing a PhD in Australia, which, as she said “is just an excuse or catalyst to bring my children to Australia because there is no door open to me to go to Australia except for doing a PhD.”

As a family woman, undertaking a PhD in Australia was the best option to avoid family separation for both Giang and Tram whose partners were also doing their PhDs in Australia. Giang, for instance, recalled three options that her husband gave her, quitting her job as a university lecturer in Vietnam and joining him, continuing to live in Vietnam with their son or—the most challenging option—studying for the IELTS test and applying for a PhD scholarship to come to Australia. Giang went with the third option because “I am a family woman, I love my family and do not want any separation.” Here, mobility and the married women seem to be regulated by the ideology of a Vietnamese family woman. Further details about stability and movement of mobility and the married women through this ideology will be discussed in the next node, Vietnamese gender norms.

Node B: Vietnamese Gender Norms

The node of the family woman connects to Vietnamese gender norms, which work as molar lines, regulating mobility and the women into fixed and bounded spaces and creating multisclarity and multitemporality of mobility. These norms primarily take their roots in Confucian ideologies of social order that essentialized women through core social, feminine, and familial virtues such as endurance, self-sacrifice, motherly devotion, and their pivotal role in building family happiness (Hoang, 2016). For single women, not having a partner at a certain age subjects them to not conforming to the feminine virtues of getting married and maintaining family happiness. Ha and Dao both returned to Vietnam to work after having completed their master's programs overseas and sometimes felt uncomfortable with being questioned about when they were going to marry. For instance, Ha noted:

If I were a man, I would not be under such pressure, but this turns out to be luck because such pressure drives me to work hard and apply for a PhD scholarship to leave and have my balanced life. If I were a man, I would be relaxing and probably would not be driven to pursue a PhD.

Despite the molar structures of gendered expectations around marriage, molecular lines can be seen through the ways that the single women resist and escape social norms and expectations through their decisions to work hard, study overseas and seek balance in their lives that does not conform to Vietnamese feminine virtues.

For the married women, undertaking a PhD overseas works as an opportunity to transgress the boundaries of being a Vietnamese family woman who is expected to prioritize family interests over individual desires and needs (Hoang, 2016), even as the decision to become mobile is made possible by the women's perception of responsibility to their children and partners. Undertaking a PhD requires time, effort, and intellectual ability and may not always be compatible with the Confucian ideologies of a family woman and intensive mothering. Yet, the women are able to carve out spaces in which to think about themselves otherwise: not only as family women, mothers, or “authentic” PhD researchers in traditional ways, through their decisions to undertake a PhD in Australia, but in another way in which mobility connects family, motherhood, and research in complex ways.

Node C: Valuing Education

The value that families place on education played an important role in these women's decision-making processes, connecting to gender norms and the family woman even though not fully determining their mobility. This connection illustrates the heterogeneity of a rhizome that jumps “from one already differentiated line to another” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 10).

Most of the women were born in middle- and upper-class families whose parents emphasized the importance of education for the future development of their children in accordance with traditional Vietnamese Confucian values. All the women talked at length about being born into families that valued education and thus studying hard for a good future, pursuing education overseas in Western countries, and undertaking a PhD become “ordinary things.” Nhung, for instance, believed that undertaking a PhD was just “the final step” of the education ladder because “the bookworm at home (in Vietnam), as you see, they complete a master's and then a PhD, so doing a PhD is something very normal, and if you have opportunity, have scholarship, then you go.”

The contour of the molar structure of valuing education to upgrade social class is shaped not only by present happenings, but also by the historical past. This valuing of education is inextricably linked to the Vietnamese feudal regime with its deep social stratification between the king, aristocracy, and peasants. The most effective way for peasants to upgrade their social class was by studying, participating in and passing the three Confucian government exams and becoming mandarins (Cao, 2001). The valuing of education, particularly the idea of studying overseas in advanced Western capital societies, has also long been argued to be historically formed alongside the expansion of empires and colonial projects into Africa, Latin America, Oceania, and Asia (Kim, 2009; Rizvi, 2010; Robertson & Komljenovic, 2016). In addition, undertaking a PhD overseas claims itself within the molar structure of mobility where standardized modes of subjectivity are judged by the criteria of the neoliberal labor market such as competitiveness and profitability (Kim, 2010).

Yet the identity categories of upgrading social class with their associated past and contemporary power relations are “undermined” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) by molecular lines, seen through the perceptions of doing a PhD overseas as a “part of filial duty” or as a way of not further disappointing parents. As Phuc revealed:

My parents have four daughters and I know that they really wanted to have a son. So, when I was little, I was aware that they were, to some extent, unhappy and thus I promised myself that I would not do anything to further disappoint them. All of my sisters also thought that way. We all tried our best not to make them feel disappointed about us. My eldest sister studied overseas (Russia) when she was 17 and my second sister is an academic staff in a prestigious Vietnamese university and I did my PhD in Australia and stayed here. So doing a PhD came very naturally.

Such molecular lines can be interpreted to at least partially carry away the molar structures of historically upgrading social status, the “West” and “Rest” binary, and the contemporary neoliberal modes of subjectivity that constitute the neoliberal individual, even as they are reclaimed by the structures of filial duty. Through mobility, the aspiration of becoming a good child is created and remains in-between these molar structures.

Node D: “Everyone is Doing a PhD”

The competition to do a PhD in universities in Vietnam is also perceived by these women as an important part of their decision to become mobile. “Everyone is doing a PhD,” as experienced by Giang, is another important threshold where the women and crossing borders to undertake a PhD meet and transform each other. Giang explained that everyone around her, such as her friends, colleagues, and even her sister, were doing PhDs in Vietnamese institutions, but also that they found the experience both easy and costly because “they really have to focus on ceremonial steps in doing a PhD such as preparing envelopes, money and gifts for the panel and supervisors as well to make sure they can pass,” Other women, Vy, Phuc, Ly, Le, Truc, and Kieu expressed that common among their institutions was the expectation that they obtain a doctoral qualification to maintain their university lectureship position. As Truc, working in a leading regional university in Central Vietnam, noted:

My university requires all academic staff to have doctoral degree by 2020 or else we are not allowed to continue teaching. I want to continue teaching and I have been teaching English so I have to do a PhD in an English-speaking country.

The prevalence of this idea that “everyone was undertaking a PhD” was observed by the first author when she worked for a university in Hanoi from 2008 to 2015:

On my first working day, the vice president reminded us of making commitments to doing master's and PhD overseas (PhD requirement is only for academic staff in specialising faculties offering undergraduate and postgraduate studies). At the staff tea room, a senior retired colleague frequently said to me that he still continued teaching because most of younger colleagues in his department were on study leave, doing a master's program and then a PhD overseas. He even half-jokingly said that it was meaningless to organise any staff meetings in his department because the meeting room was scattered with a few retired old academic staff, the head and a technical support assistant.

Here, this competition node comprises molarized structures with forces of rules and requirements connected with the Vietnamese higher education that have been implemented since 2005 through the Higher Education Reform Agenda, aiming to build research-intensive institutions and facilitate the global economic integration of the country.

These forces are also the consequences of the global hierarchy of higher education in which globalization and neoliberalism have compelled higher education sectors in the global south, including the Vietnamese higher education, to reform and compete (Robertson & Komljenovic, 2016). Such hierarchy is clearly documented through the experiences of some women who emphasized the superior standard of Western education as they decided to undertake their doctoral studies in Australia. Ha, for instance, had prioritized her aspiration to undertake a doctorate in an English-speaking country since she was a university student:

I felt that after the completion of my master's degree (in Taiwan), my English was okay enough, so I wanted to go to a country where English is the native language so that I can communicate better with the academic community.

The ideology of Western education as a superior standard is again connected to Node C, where undertaking a doctoral study in a Western country is regarded as an effective tool to upgrade social class and status.

Between the rules, requirements, and ideology, becoming-researcher is claimed where the women, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write about molecular lines, “swept away everything in their path and found new weapons” (p. 204). Following Deleuze and Guattari's words, Truc, for instance, found her new weapon through her belief in accepting a PhD scholarship offered by the Australian government:

When you won the lottery, you would never reject it, wouldn’t you? So I think accepting this scholarship is like winning the lottery. Facing a big amount of money, I thought about rejecting it but at the end, I did not.

Other women claimed their status as actual researchers through their decisions to undertake doctoral studies in Australia by pointing out hierarchical practices in doctoral education in Vietnam which, Dao, for instance, defined as an “abnormal research culture.” In this way, the opportunity to become mobile is seen as highly contingent and even serendipitous, thus, the aspiration to become otherwise (an actual researcher) through mobility is constantly in between the stratified Vietnamese higher education sector.

Node E: Life and Studies in Australia

Some of the women talked about the perceived quality of life and studies in Australia as one of the major aspects contributing to their decision-making process, reconnecting the opportunities engendered by neoliberal education reforms back to family and gender norms. It is apparent that the global and national dynamic competition of Australian universities in recruiting international research students to leverage research performance and tuition revenues (Warren, 2016) significantly affects these women through their decision-making processes. Sa, a PhD student in chemical engineering who planned to do her PhD in Australia so that she could bring a better life and future for her children, explained what she did to receive a PhD scholarship in a highly ranked Australian university. When undertaking her master's study in Korea, she did not follow the same pathway of submitting research papers to low impact factor journals as her lab mates did because:

chemical engineering [in the Australian university where Sa wanted to study] was ranked the best in Australia. So, I started to go to other labs, asking for new materials and equipment to conduct more complex experiments and publishing in higher ranking journals.

Kieu revealed that two prestigious Australian universities offered her a PhD scholarship and one of these, in her words, was “happy to top up extra 5000 AUD living allowance a year as long as I accepted to do PhD there.” While being caught up in the stratified Australian higher education that might regulate the women as economic subjects, mobility is made of molecular lines where the women partially disassociate themselves from this regulation. Both Sa and Kieu prioritize the need of their children and family in undertaking their PhDs in Australia and choosing the right universities. Their choice again connects to Node A that makes themselves Vietnamese family women.

Mobility is also formed through the global dominance of the U.S. higher education sector which rests on a group of leading doctoral universities and the subsequent subordination of other institutions and nations (Marginson, 2008). Phuc, for instance, took the varying language, lifestyle and academic environment between the US and Australia to make her decision:

Unlike Phuc, the United States was Duyen and Ha's first preference, with both PhD students majoring in engineering. Duyen considered the United States as the “American dream” that was difficult to reach and decided to choose Australia due to its proximity to Vietnam and its status as an English-speaking country. Duyen did not want to continue her PhD in Korea where she did her master's study, even though her supervisor offered her a full PhD scholarship, because she aspired to become academically and financially independent while receiving adequate support as an international student. Ha had desired to go to the United States and “had targeted some good universities.” However, she changed her mind, having found a good supervisor working on research projects closely related to her research background in a prestigious Australian university.

Like the case of Phuc, mobility is within the molar structure or stratification of global higher education which involves constant international comparisons (between Korean and Australian higher education and between American and Australian higher education), unequal distribution of educational status and resources, and the dominance of universities from the Anglo-American nations, particularly the United States of America (Marginson & van der Wende, 2007). At the same time, mobility comprises molecular lines with aspirations to become a family woman (as in the case of Nhung), which again connects to Node A, and an independent and good researcher.