Being-in-return: Reconceptualizing return migration as relational becoming in Vietnam's education-related mobilities

Vietnamese student returnees' experiences are paid less attention than outbound international student mobilities. This study delves into the homecoming sense-making of Vietnamese returning graduates and reconceptualizes education-related return mobilities as relational being-in-return. Drawing on Heidegger's philosophical concept of being-in-the-world, being-in-return explains how international student returns are embedded in familial, institutional, and socio-historical relations. Based on interpretive phenomenological analysis of 30 returnees, five interrelated dimensions are identified: familial care and belonging, scholarship obligations and career continuity, relational tensions, knowledge circulation, and social and ethical responsibility. Homecoming experiences are conceptualized as a process of identity reconstruction, affective evaluation, and meaning making through which education returnees interpret their past experiences and project a future self. This study theorizes return as the transformative process of the self through negotiations of being, belonging, and future possibilities.