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.

这项以民族志为研究对象的民族志研究，不同于以跨国为特色的倾向于灵活性，扁平化关系和地域化的主导趋势，它从理论上并举例说明了地方的重要性如何在跨国流动的背景下引起学术的发展。我考察了自己的职业轨迹，以证明扎根是如何从流离失所和进驻之间的动力中产生的。在叙述我在西方大学和我在越南的母校之间来回迁移的经验的同时，我探讨了诸如跨国流动的国家建设框架，学术自我形成和社区培养之类的问题。该研究以一种称为“存在承诺”的进驻模式为中心。它呼吁人们注意小小的栽培，直接学术社区，是全球外围国家的一种奖学金形式。重点是如何使跨国公司立足于本地学术实践，从而在多个层面和规模上应对世界。