The racial grammar of South-South cooperation: Vietnamese development experts in Mozambique

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dc.contributor.advisorKlees, Steven J.en_US
dc.contributor.authorLe, Hang Minhen_US
dc.contributor.departmentEducation Policy, and Leadershipen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2022-09-20T05:32:41Z
dc.date.available2022-09-20T05:32:41Z
dc.date.issued2022en_US
dc.description.abstractIn recent years, mounting criticisms of international development aid to education have led many policymakers, practitioners, and scholars to look to South-South cooperation (SSC) as an alternative. This study problematizes the current fascination with SSC through a critical narrative inquiry of six Vietnamese education and health development specialists in Mozambique. Since the 1980s, hundreds of Vietnamese teachers, policymakers, and education experts have been sent to Mozambique to support educational policy and practice, rooted in the spirit of Third World socialist solidarity. Yet these Vietnamese development experts have been largely invisible in normative accounts of international development and education aid. This study examines whether and how the Vietnamese-Mozambican program of expert cooperation recognizes, reproduces, and/or resists the typical racial hierarchies in international development, and whether their experience suggests more ethical forms of engaging in international aid and cooperation. On the one hand, as a bilateral governmental exchange, the Vietnamese-Mozambican case of SSC has a more balanced structure that is significantly different from traditional Western aid, and the Vietnamese experts enter the field with complex motivations focusing on themselves and their families rather than on the need to help strangers abroad. On the other hand, the experts’ stories reveal how this is also an Asian-Black encounter underwritten by the global racial grammar of development which continues to govern who can count as developed and who continue to be the ‘backward Other’. Through centering issues of racialization and racism in education and international development, with an explicit focus on de-romanticizing SSC, this study provides an important contribution to our understanding of international education development policy and practice as well as attempts to strive for a better world.en_US
dc.identifierhttps://doi.org/10.13016/gu1g-lgal
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/29209
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledEducationen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledInternational relationsen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledforeign aiden_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledglobal racismen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledinternational developmenten_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledMozambiqueen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledSouth-South cooperationen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledVietnamen_US
dc.titleThe racial grammar of South-South cooperation: Vietnamese development experts in Mozambiqueen_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

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