‘Through guilt and resilience, we author ourselves’: a collaborative autoethnography of Vietnamese PhD student mothers / ‘A través de la culpa y la resiliencia, nos escribimos a nosotras mismas’: una autoetnografía de madres doctorandas vietnamitas

In this article, we employed collaborative autoethnography to explore the experiences of ourselves as four Vietnamese PhD student mothers who crossed national borders in pursuit of further education and encountered multiple challenges along the way. Based on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, we unpacked our experiences by presenting ongoing dialogues that influenced thoughts about our doctoral studies and mothering practices. On the one hand, we recounted our experiences of mother guilt, life–work balance and escalating tensions in the academic journeys and our constant struggle to conform to the moral norms bound by the political and cultural ideologies prescribed to Vietnamese women. At the same time, we displayed our resilience through our self-dialogues, which helped us counter the social norms to author our voices.