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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Bahnar youth in Vietnam’s Central Highlands aspire for education amid ethnic, class, and religious polarisation. It shows how the Catholic church - as a third space - shape layered meanings of schooling—as moral cultivation, social respectability, and being global Catholic.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the multiplicities in meanings of education for indigenous Bahnar youth in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, a region marked by growing ethnic, class, and religious polarisations. Despite national narratives of socialist equality, ethnic minorities face persistent structural disadvantages, which are further complicated by religion: Catholic Highland communities carry historical associations with colonialism and contemporary political suspicion.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2022–2025, the study traces how education is discussed, valued, and enacted across "third space" of Catholic church. Aspiration of education assumes layered meanings: as Catholic moral self-cultivation, as being biết điều (knowing how to behave), as a pathway to respectability within Kinh-dominated society, and as a route to becoming a global Catholic.

Through sermons, moral narratives, and development-oriented practices, experiences of ethnic stigma, educational difficulty, and generational insecurity are reframed through the Catholic discourse of thăng tiến (advancement). Within this framework, education is a way of becoming a disciplined, knowledgeable, morally upright Bahnar subject capable of parity with the Kinh majority. Drawing on Appadurai’s notion of the "capacity to aspire," the study shows how church spaces expand symbolic and relational resources for imagining the future, without resolving structural constraints.

These meanings remain unstable: while some youth leverage church-based networks to pursue schooling or vocational training, others encounter blocked pathways and repeated disappointment. Education thus becomes a site of negotiation, where uncertain hopes are continuously recalibrated, reflecting the ongoing "wrestling with futures" of Bahnar youth to live meaningfully amid limited and uneven possibilities.