Transnationally trained scholars working in global contexts knowledge production, identity, epistemology, and career trajectories (2)

946226

RCI0010.1177/1745499920946226Research in Comparative and International EducationL.-H. Phan et al.

research-article2020

Editorial

Transnationally-trained scholars
working in global contexts:
Knowledge production, identity,
epistemology, and career
trajectories

Research in Comparative &
International Education
2020, Vol. 15(3) 189–196
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
/>DOI: 10.1177/1745499920946226
journals.sagepub.com/home/rci

Phan Le Ha
Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Darussalam; University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA

Liam C. Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Darussalam

Rommel A. Curaming
Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Darussalam

Introduction
With the increasing internationalization of higher education (HE) globally over the past two decades, there are now more scholars with some form of transnational mobility and experience than
ever before (see, for example, Bauder et al., 2018; Chen, 2017; Jenkins, 2019; Jöns, 2018; Kim
SK, 2016; Kim T, 2017, 2020; Kim and Locke, 2010; Koh and Sin, 2020; Kuzhabekova et al.,
2019; Ortiga et al., 2018; Xu and Montgomery, 2018). From graduate students who obtain a PhD
in a foreign country and then return to their home society to work, to professors who take up positions in a country other than the one(s) where they were raised and/or studied, the staff at ever
more universities across the globe comprise ever more individuals with various forms of transnational experiences. Such a development has obvious ramifications for everything from research to
pedagogy, to career satisfaction. However, given the newness of the scale of this phenomenon,
there is still so much about the reality of transnationally-trained scholars working in global contexts that we do not know about, or that we (erroneously) assume must be the case. This Special
Issue (SI) is therefore an attempt to learn more about this phenomenon with an emphasis on
autoethnographic and in-depth qualitative and ethnographic data, to explore the lives and experiences of a group of transnationally-trained scholars working in global contexts, and to learn about

Corresponding author:
Phan Le Ha, International and Comparative Education, and Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti
Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei.
Emails: ;


190

Research in Comparative & International Education 15(3)

how their transnational experiences intersect with and influence their knowledge production,
identity, pedagogy, epistemology, and career trajectories.
At its broadest level, this SI builds on the traditions of postcolonial and decolonial critiques of
knowledge (Bhambra, 2014; Brennan, 2004, 2012; Loomba et al., 2005; Mignolo, 2013; Takayama
et al., 2017) and the works of Heryanto (2002), Chen (2010) and Phan (2017) that argue for the
need to question the geopolitics of local knowledge and ideology, to examine the varied forms and
complexity of a wide range of “global” and “local” knowledge, thoughts, ideologies and practices

that transnational scholars assume, encounter, operate from within, and negotiate their positionalities with. It identifies and discusses the opportunities and challenges presented to transnationally-trained scholars’ re(engagement) with their varied localities across Asia, Europe, the
Americas, Oceania, and the Gulf region. It demonstrates how the intersecting politics and hegemony of certain and specific global/Western and local forms of knowledge, thoughts and ideologies
can embed and shape transnational scholars’ scholarship, research practices, pedagogies, classroom dynamics, identity and career trajectories. It also investigates how such scholars respond to
nuanced understandings of, and competing discourses underlying, varied bodies of mainstream
global/Western/local knowledge.
At a more specific level, however, this SI moves beyond the usual business of critiquing and
de-colonizing “the West”, as it pays careful attention to the dynamic realities of the changing
global HE scenes, as well as of multiple specific workplace contexts. Such scenes and contexts are
always inherently hierarchical and organically transforming. They are at the same time shaped by
particular logics of power relations and agency politics, which are as uniquely place-grounded and
specific as universally interactive and border-crossing. As such, “the West” and what comes with
it should not and must not remain the sole and dominant target of scholarly critiques (Luke, 2010,
2019; Phan, 2017). Further, by highlighting the transnationality and mobility aspects of knowledge
production (Fenwick and Farrell, 2011; Jöns et al., 2017; Phan, 2011, 2017, 2019; Rizvi and
Lingard, 2010) and those who actively produce knowledge in transnational space, this SI unpacks,
addresses and advances theoretical, methodological, empirical, and conceptual issues embedded in
and arising from the work of each individual scholar contributing to this collection. It recognizes
and locates knowledge and knowledge production in transnational space, showing the fluidity and
the interactivity of multiple bodies of knowledge that are, in many cases, problematic if labeled in
dichotomous terms and superficially compared.
At the same time, this SI highlights the grounded-ness of knowledge production in the local
conditions in which each of the contributors is immersed. Each paper contextualizes the politics of
local knowledge specific to its own focus and brings to the fore multiple voices and insights from
within, such as those from Western-trained English language teachers working in Saudi Arabia
(Alshakhi and Phan), from White male academics moving South from the conventional “Center”
(Kelley; Windle), from transnationally-trained returnees to their native homelands (Alshakhi and
Phan; Karakas; Nonaka; Phan and Mohamad; and Phung), and from scholars transitioning across
varied secular educational systems and more religion-informed settings (Alshakhi and Phan; Phan
and Mohamad). These voices are their own voices and the voices of their research participants,
who are also subject to transnationality and mobility of knowledge, ideas, and knowledge production in their own training and everyday work in HE. Through their research studies, the contributing authors investigate their participants’ multi-layered negotiations and struggles with conflicting

narratives underlying the dominance of certain local knowledge and ideology. Likewise, through
their autoethnographic data, these authors examine their own scholarship, epistemologies, and
positionalities as well as their evolving/revised intellectual growth and approaches to research,
teaching, and learning.


L.-H. Phan et al.

191

The contributing authors are transnational scholars who have received at least one degree from
Western universities in Europe, North America, and Oceania. They currently hold positions in
universities in the “Global South” and are often referred to as Western-trained academics. While
there are many issues that these authors addressed, some overarching themes that emerge across
the articles revolve around issues of home, transnationality, and mobility.

Grounded-ness in mobility and the multiplicity of “home”,
“foreign”, and “local” “home”
“I FEEL it is wrong to go on writing books and plays about American subjects using ideas and methods
that we get abroad,” Thomas Wolfe announced. As his country’s self-appointed bard, he planned to
compose a vast saga, using a distinctly American idiom and employing a uniquely American structure, that
would capture “the whole intolerable memory of America, its violence, savagery, immensity, beauty,
ugliness, and glory.” (David Herbert Donald, 1983, New York Times1)

Perhaps it is universal that home often means a place where one feels one belongs and can connect
with, draw on, relate to, and one is inclined to glorify, honor, and defend. In this sense, home is
associated with certain constructed meanings and structures, shared histories and ideologies,
widely promoted symbolic and physical landscapes, and spiritual suffering and endurance. All
these come with a strong sense of home as holding and embracing lasting geographic and metaphysical materials that one values and wants to show one’s own people and the world.
At the same time, in his autobiographic novel You Can’t Go Home Again (1940/2011)

published after his death, American author Thomas Wolfe gracefully and painfully captured
a permanent truth that home is never the same once you’ve left, and you can never return to
the home you brought with you in your recollections and association. Neither is home what
it was or what you remember it and imagine it to be in the past and in the present. Like home,
you as a social being are never the same over time.
While this SI corresponds philosophically and epistemologically to the above perspective, it
also offers extra nuances informed by multi-directional encounters that transnationally-trained
scholars accumulate and reflect upon. The meanings associated with “home”, “foreign”, and
“local” are multiple and generative. On the one hand, this collection shows in what ways “home”
and “local” are contested and constructed concepts and are not always connected to one’s homeland, native country, or country of birth; and that the “foreign” can become a certain “home” such
as an intellectual home, a scholarly and academic home, and a home to escape from one’s native
home (see, for example, Karakas; Phan and Mohamad; and Phung).
The intermixing of “home”, “foreign” and “transnational” is complexly examined and discussed
throughout these articles. At the same time, this SI engages with “home”, “foreign” and “local” as
specific places with their particular power relations, politics, and relationships with others (all the
articles in this collection). As such, to bring out the multi-layered nuances of transnational academic mobilities and experiences and to move beyond repeating grand narratives on this area of
studies, we maintain that the specificity and particularity of “local”, “foreign” and “home” must be
contextualized and discussed and presented with substance. Locality, place, and grounded-ness are
never less important than transnationality, mobility, and globalization, as Phan has argued in her
scholarship (Phan, 2008, 2011, 2017, 2019) and as shown in all the articles in this SI. Treating
“home”, “foreign” and “local” in complex terms promises to advance scholarship on academic
transnationality and knowledge production in this increasing transnational and mobile world of
global HE.


192

Research in Comparative & International Education 15(3)

Multiple manifestations of transnationality

Another significant contribution made by the SI is its identification and interrogation of the complex and multiple facets of transnationality in HE. All the included articles illustrate a range of
specific ways by which transnationality manifests simultaneously in multiple facets: as an analytic
concept; a state of mind or being; an experience; a process; an imagined space; a diasporic haven;
a virtual interface; a manifestation of emotion(al) labor; a repurpose of an idea and discourse; a
dialectical relation; a positionality; an identification; a set of relations; an evolving relationship;
and a constant recollection and reflection. It may also be a self-ascribed or an imposed label or
sense of identity. By being mindful of the ontological difference between transnationality as a lived
experience and as an analytic construct, this SI opens up new grounds for theorizing transnationality and knowledge production. It does so by also foregrounding the role of scholars as powerplayer, power-consumer, and power-(re)producer as well as the unevenness, fluidity and
grounded-ness of power relations that inform knowledge production, in general, and academic
transnationality, in particular. All in all, it makes it clear that transnationality and transnationalism
do not and should not entertain the assumption that all transnationally-trained-and-exposed academics can be lumped together under dominant narratives of transnational experience told repeatedly in existing scholarship.

Mobility: Private, public, government-funded, institutionallydriven, self-initiated
Interestingly, the transnational mobilities and imaginaries, as shared and discussed in this collection, do not always start with an act of cross-country travel in the first place, but could begin with
their fascination of a foreign being and/or foreign society, their fantasies about a place different
from their own, or their exposures to popular culture and certain academic texts that subconsciously form their transnational lenses. In many ways, transnational mobilities can be as accidental and spontaneous as planned and strategically prepared. In the same vein, transnational mobilities
can be as pragmatic and financially driven as intellectually informed and desired for.
Mobility can be a private act and a personal pursuit as much as it is a public investment in the
forms of policy and institutional aspirations for the training and recruitment of talents. As such,
transnationally-trained scholars often find themselves caught in and subject to the brain gain/brain
drain/brain circulation debates and narratives among different actors including governments, international organizations, institutions, academics, and tax payers. Of course, these scholars do not
necessarily experience once-and-for-all transnational academic grand narratives of transnationalism, as we have argued earlier.

Critical reflection, life story, autoethnography and empirical
research
Through a combination of autoethnographic and empirical data, the authors in this SI examine their
own scholarship, pedagogies, epistemologies, and positionalities as well as their evolving/revised
intellectual growth and approaches to research, teaching, and learning. Critical reflection and life
stories are vividly interwoven in all the articles. We do not want to take away your curiosity about
how each of the individual articles showcases the artistry of blending autoethnography, ethnography, and other data components, so we will say no more.

On another note, the focus of this SI and its methodological richness and nuances as well as the
specific accounts and questions examined in each article have ignited unexpected reflections on the


L.-H. Phan et al.

193

part of some reviewers invited to referee the submissions. Such reflections have continued beyond
the reviewing process, and are thoughtful demonstrations of knowledge production and scholarship building. It has dawned on us that the kind of conversation between and among (guest) editors,
authors, and reviewers during the reviewing process is knowledge circulation and exchanges in a
space that is interactive, stimulating, reflexive, engaging, and generative, yet at times painful.
Allan Luke, Emeritus Professor, Queensland University of Technology, a transnationallytrained scholar working in Asia, Australia, and North America, is one of the external reviewers.
Allan has given us consent to include in this Editorial two accounts stemming from his own experiences and scholarship on identity, critical literacy, narrative, autoethnography, and the internationalization of HE.
Account 1
Back to that article, as a narrative it’s packed with contradictions and unresolved issues . . . . I like the
open-ended-ness of Khalid’s dilemma and life (Khalid was the pseudonym of one of the contributing
authors during review). I’m finding that identity is like an empty set, it’s a point of aspiration and striving,
an immanent term. . .. And I like that it didn’t become focal in that piece. (Allan Luke, email exchange, 18
February 2020)

Account 2
In my work in Singapore and China, I’ve tried to extrapolate from my experience with Aboriginal Australia
which had many, many hard lessons about the limits of my own “minoritization” and how this changed as
I shifted to a position of power, when you’ve moved from margin to center of another margin, the optics
and speaking position change.
As you’ll see from my own autoethnographic stuff in the narrative volume (Luke, 2019)—it requires a fair
amount of work to ensure the kind of honesty and self-understanding comes across without it slipping into
scholarly narcissism (Allan Luke, email exchange, 19 February 2020).

The accounts presented above from Allan Luke point to the importance of ethics and conduct of
care, respect and humility, in academia and scholarship production, which we elaborate a little
more below.

Ethics and conduct of care
A recurring theme and an important contribution of this SI is its engagement with the ethics of
writing on transnational academic mobilities, regardless of whether one employs autoethnography,
life stories, personal narratives or empirically collected data. Such ethics lies in the authors’ honest
and critical conversations with and reflections on troubling, troubled, ambiguous, awkward, inspiring, and painful experiences and encounters occurring in their journeys. These conversations and
reflections ought not to glorify, romanticize, victimize, sensationalize, fixate, and perpetuate dominant power relations and ontology in academia, as well as in our self-portrayal as knowers. We see
more clearly the importance of deconstructing the importance of constructing an identity, in this
case a transnational identity. Echoing Luke (2019, 2020), we call for more attention to ethics and
conduct of care as well as a fine balance of self-reflexivity and humility, as we are working with
autoethnography and ethnography in our construction of knowledge. We have constantly been
humbled by the sincerity, honesty, and labor-intensive crafting of autoethnographic and ethnographic narratives, and data building in all the articles.


194

Research in Comparative & International Education 15(3)

Acknowledgements
We thank Professor Hubert Ertl, Editor of Research in Comparative and International Education (RCIE) for
the support of this Special Issue (SI). The guidance provided by Professor Ertl and RCIE Editorial Assistant
Heidi Möhker throughout the process is greatly appreciated. Also, we thank all the contributing authors
(Abdullah Alshakhi, Ali Karakas, Liam C. Kelley, Azmi Mohamad, Chisato Nonaka, Phan Le Ha, Thanh
Phung, and Joel Windle) and reviewers who have together with us made this SI possible.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note
1.

(accessed 26
May 2020).

References
Bauder H, Omar L and Charity-Ann H (2018) Internationally mobile academics: Hierarchies, hegemony, and
the geoscientific imagination. Geoforum 89: 52–59.
Bhambra G (2014) Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues. Postcolonial Studies 17(2): 115–121.
Brennan T (2004) Postcolonial studies between the European wars: An intellectual history. In: Bartolovich C
and Lazarus N (eds) Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 185–204.
Brennan T (2012) Re-imagining postcolonial studies: A discussion of Neil Lazarus’s The Postcolonial
Unconscious. Race & Class 54(2): 100–107.
Chen K-H (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chen Q (2017) Globalization and Transnational Academic Mobility: The Experiences of Chinese Academic
Returnees. Singapore: Springer Singapore.
Fenwick T and Farrell L (2011) Knowledge Mobilization and Educational Research: Politics, Languages and
Responsibilities. London: Routledge.
Heryanto A (2002) Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies? Moussons 5: 3–30.
Jenkins S (2019) Examining the (im)mobility of African American Muslim TESOL teachers in Saudi Arabia.
Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration 3(2): 157–175.
Jöns H (2018) Boundary-crossing academic mobilities in glocal knowledge economies: New research agendas based on triadic thought, Globalisation, Societies and Education 16(2): 151–161.
Jöns H, Meusburger P and Heffernan M (eds) (2017) Mobilities of Knowledge. Cham, Switzerland: Springer
International.
Kim SK (2016) Western faculty “flight risk” at a Korean university and the complexities of internationalisation in Asian higher education. Comparative Education 52(1): 78–90.
Kim T (2017) Academic mobility, transnational identity capital, and stratification under conditions of academic capitalism. Higher Education 73(6): 981–997.
Kim T (2020) Diasporic comparative education: An initial tribute to anxiety and hope. Comparative Education

56(1): 111–126.
Kim T and Locke W (2010) Transnational Academic Mobility and the Academic Profession. London: The
Open University.
Koh SY and Sin IL (2020) Academic and teacher expatriates: Mobilities, positionalities, and subjectivities.
Geography Compass 14(5): e12487. DOI:10.1111/gec3.12487.
Kuzhabekova A, Sparks J and Temerbayeva A (2019) Returning from study abroad and transitioning as a
scholar: Stories of foreign PhD holders from Kazakhstan. Research in Comparative and International
Education 14(3): 412–430.
Loomba A, Esty J, Burton A, et al. (eds) (2005) Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.


L.-H. Phan et al.

195

Luke A (2010) Educating the “Other”: Standpoint and the internationalization of higher education. In:
Carpentier V and Unterhalter E (eds) Global Inequalities in Higher Education: Whose Interests Are You
Serving? London: Palgrave Macmillan, 43–65.
Luke A (2019) Educational Policy, Narrative and Discourse. New York: Routledge.
Luke A (2020) Email exchanges with guest editor Phan Le Ha. (18 February and 19 February 2020).
Mignolo W (2013) Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de)coloniality, border thinking, and epistemic
disobedience. Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics 1(1): 129–150.
Ortiga YY, Chou M, Sondhi G, et al. (2018) Working within the aspiring center: Professional status and
mobilities among migrant faculty in Singapore. High Education Policy 32: 149–166.
Phan LH (2008) Teaching English as an International Language: Identity, Resistance and Negotiation.
Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Phan LH (2011) Fighting for the role of the nation state in knowledge mobilisation and educational research:
An autoethnography of a mobile Vietnamese scholar. In: Fenwick T and Farrell L (eds) Knowledge
Mobilisation and Educational Research: Politics, Languages and Responsibilities. London: Routledge,

100–112.
Phan LH (2017) Transnational Education Crossing ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’: Adjusted Desire, Transformative
Mediocrity, and Neo-Colonial Disguise. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Phan LH (2019) Examining the politics, hierarchy, specificity and fluidity of ‘homes’ and ‘hosts’ in transnational diaspora knowledge production and international higher education. Paper presented at the Forum
“Diaspora and Internationalisation in Higher Education”, University College London, 10th May, 2019.
Rizvi F and Lingard B (2010) Globalizing Education Policy. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Takayama K, Sriprakash A and Connell R (2017) Toward a postcolonial comparative and international education. Comparative Education Review 61(S1): 1–24.
Wolfe T (1940/2011) You Can’t Go Home Again. Reprint edition. New York: Scribner, October.
Xu CL and Montgomery C (2018) Educating China on the move: A typology of contemporary Chinese higher
education mobilities. Review of Education 7(3): 598–627. doi:10.1002/rev3.3139

Author biographies
Phan Le Ha (PhD) is a Senior Professor at Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei
Darussalam, Brunei (UBD) and also Head of the International and Comparative Education Research Group at
UBD. Prior to Brunei, She was tenured Full Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations, College
of Education, University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) where she maintains her affiliation, and Senior Lecturer
at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She has taught and written extensively
on global/international/transnational higher education, international development and education, identity–
language–culture–pedagogy, educational mobilities, English language education, and sociology of knowledge and education. Her research work has covered many contexts in Southeast Asia, East Asia, the AsiaPacific and the Gulf regions. Alongside her role as series editor for the “New Perspectives on Language and
Education – Multilingual Matters” (with Joel Windle), She also serves on the editorial board of several international journals. For more information about her, please visit: />Liam C. Kelley is an Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the Institute of Asian Studies at
Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He was formerly an associate professor of History at the University of Hawaii
at Manoa. His research focuses primarily on premodern Vietnamese history and its modern manifestations
and interpretations. However, he has taught a wide range of courses on Vietnamese, Southeast Asian, Asian
and world history. He is also a co-organizer of the “Engaging with Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue”
annual conference series, where he regularly presents on issues relating to knowledge production.
Rommel A. Curaming is a Senior Assistant Professor of History and International Studies Programme,
University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD). He is also the Coordinator of the Southeast Asian Studies
Programme. He obtained a PhD in Southeast Asian Studies from the Australian National University. He also
did master’s studies at the National University of Singapore and University of the Philippines (Diliman).
Before joining UBD, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore and La Trobe

196

Research in Comparative & International Education 15(3)

University. He has published articles and book reviews in international journals such as Critical Asian Studies,
Time and Society, Sojourn, Philippine Studies, South East Asia Research, Southeast Asian Studies, and
Suvannabhumi: Multi-disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, among other journals. His research
interests include history and memory of political violence, comparative history and historiography, history
and popular culture, politics of knowledge production and consumption, heritage-making, place-making,
Filipino Malayness, state–scholar relations, political-ethics of scholarship, postcolonial theory and decoloniality movement.