UC Riverside

This dissertation investigates how educational agency performed by young adults in Việt Nam is utilized to build and sustain the socialist nation-building project. Drawing on a framework of governmentality, I analyze the rationale of governance and agency through Việt Nam’s experiment with differing political economies to contribute to anthropological debates on how the shift from collective action for the greater common good to liberal individualism by young adults, sustain or compromise the socialist nation-building project. I collected data for this research from the National Archive #3 in Hà Nội, narratives from people living through Việt Nam’s experiment with different political economies in Hà Nội, Hồ Chí Minh City, and Đà Nẵng City, in-school participation-observation and volunteering work with the Youth Union in Đà Nẵng City, as well as inter-personal communication with a variety of social actors from revolutionary educators, educational researchers, teachers, to students and their families. I will demonstrate the social, economic and political forces that shaped educational experiences of revolutionary workers that migrated from Northern to Southern Việt Nam to spread revolutionary education during the American-War years, to centralized educational practices under reunification, then to liberalized educational practices in contemporary times to make the argument that, although liberalization of the market-economy relieved financial burden from the nation-state in allowing individuals to pursue economic activities outside the confines of the state sectors, liberalization also introduced great challenges to young adults, the educational as well as employment fields, which strived for the socialist collective goal of matching appropriate forms of education with appropriate employment to continue sustaining the socialist project.