Departing from the dominant trend of favoring flexibility, flattened relations, and deterritorialization in featuring the transnational, this autoethnographic inquiry theorizes and exemplifies how the gravity of place may give rise to the evolvement of scholarship in the context of transnational mobility. I examine my own career trajectory to demonstrate how groundedness results from the dynamics between displacement and emplacement. While recounting my experience of moving back and forth between Western universities and my home institution in Vietnam, I explore issues such as the nation building framework for transnational mobility, scholarly self-formation, and community cultivation. The study centers a mode of emplacement termed ‘existential commitment’. It calls attention to the cultivation of a small, immediate scholarly community as a form of scholarship in the global periphery. The emphasis is on how the transnational can be grounded in local academic practices that address the world at multiple layers and scales.

Internationalization at home' (IaH), a term highlighting that the internationalization of higher education involves more than outbound student and staff mobility, first took root in Europe and then spread to higher education systems in North America and Australia. Signifying a move to mainstreaming internationalization within the overall quality of domestic higher education, IaH was once popular but somehow lost momentum. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where outbound mobility is severely impeded, Vietnam has become home to energetic discussions on IaH. This chapter spotlights the case of IaH in Vietnam's higher education, demonstrating that it implies a whole different constellation of relations. While IaH in Vietnam invokes an existing more or less neocolonial network of relations shaped by mobilizing Western ideas and forms, discourses emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic have opened up opportunities to push the currently dominant configuration into multiple directions. Particularly, this chapter argues that IaH can be in line with place-based internationalization, theorized as a mode of internationalization characterized by commitments related to local/community engagement, student wellbeing, and care. While mobility-driven internationalization produces 'accelerated desire', place-based internationalization, generates 'realistic considerations' and 'intimate relations'. IaH could tap into the resources that have been created through different forms of mobility to enact its place-based mode. Place-based internationalization cannot guarantee success and the good; however, it offers another way of life and hope, and a sense of home that matters.

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