Chi Hong Nguyen – English Faculty, FPT University Can Tho Campus, Can Tho City, Vietnam

Series: Immigration in the 21st Century: Political, Social and Economic Issues; Education in a Competitive and Globalizing World
BISAC: EDU015000; EDU040000; EDU038000
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52305/TAZE4454

Book Reviews
“The book Being-in-Return: Vietnamese Graduates’ Homecoming After International Education is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students in higher education, international education, and migration. Its unique Heideggerian approach in exploring homecoming experiences as being-in-return foregrounds an innovative way to understand the transformations of the self through mobilities. Mobilities should be extended beyond instrumentalism to existential, ethical, and caring dimensions. International education should then be perceived as nurturing graduate attributes of knowledge collectivism, embedded in the worldhood of return.” – Chi Kim Pham, PhD, Lecturer, English Faculty, FPT University, Vietnam

“The book Being-in-Return: Vietnamese Graduates’ Homecoming After International Education presents an excellent and thoughtful research process that delves deeply into Vietnamese international graduates’ return and their efforts to make sense of themselves. The interpretive phenomenological approach adopted in the research project demonstrates a dialogical engagement between the researcher and participants, allowing meanings to emerge analytically and ethically. This methodological inquiry illuminates the complexities of ethical care, temporality, and spatiality in return mobilities. It sets a high standard for qualitative research on international education using philosophical traditions.” – Dat Van Tran, PhD, Associate Professor in Higher Education, An Giang University, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City

Book Description
This book theorizes Vietnamese graduates’ homecoming after international education as being-in-return, an existential, relational, and ethical becoming grounded in Heidegger’s being-in-the-world. Based on interpretive phenomenological inquiry, the study engages 30 Vietnamese returning graduates through two in-depth conversations, observations, and reflective fieldwork. Both the researcher and participants co-construct meaning in an evolving dialogue. International education is reinterpreted as social equipment, while being-in-return reveals how care, ambiguity, and relational ethics orient returnees’ engagements with families, institutions, and state policies. Across its eight chapters, the book presents return as a dwelling mode of ethical becoming and world-(re)making in a socialist market-oriented Vietnam in motion.

The book contributes original nuance to international education, migration, and return-mobility studies by repositioning return as an embodied, ethical world-making process rather than an individual cost-benefit outcome or a simple policy instrument. It addresses a documented gap in research on Vietnamese student return migration through a phenomenological account that links temporality, spatiality, and care to the unfolding possibilities and ambivalences of dwelling-in-return. Instead of viewing return migration among international students as brain gain or brain circulation in home societies, this monograph proposes a new term: brain weaving. This term shows how knowledge, skills, and degrees transition from possession to social knowledge collectivism through ethical obligations, familial duties, institutional innovations, and public service. This book provides practical suggestions for policymakers on human capacity building, scholarship programs, universities that host international students, and home institutions. These contributions realign policy and institutional agendas with the ethical capacities of returnees for contribution and creativity.