The Revolutionary Power of Tradition: Educational Cadres in Village Schools and Decolonization

Austin Vo

How does education shape national liberation? Scholars have shown that urban educated indigenous elites were central to decolonial movements, but few have examined the foundational role of rural schooling in shaping strategies of national liberation and collective mobilization. In this dissertation, I examine how agrarian life and village education shaped divergent decolonial trajectories in the former French colonies of Senegal and Vietnam, rooted in Islamic and Confucian traditions, respectively. I collected archival records across France, Senegal, and Vietnam to analyze how education structured interactions between indigenous rural elites, urban elites, colonial authorities, and an emergent working class. Village schools emerge as key institutions, mediating tensions between rural and urban politics, as well as tradition and modernity. I contribute to research on rural rebellion, nationalism, and comparative state formation by centering how colonial-era schools conditioned the spread of political ideologies and became contested sites of governance and insurgency. By re-centering village education, the dissertation offers a bottom-up view of indigenous social mobility to examine how schooling in agrarian contexts informed the possibilities—and limits—of national liberation.

About Austin Vo

Austin Hoang-Nam Vo is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work is motivated by the question of why and how change happens—or does not—and, more importantly, what actors do about it through contentious politics. His research focuses on those of the global majority to understand how action "from below" is both cause and consequence of the emergent and contingent political structures in which it is embedded. Employing global and relational frameworks, his dissertation examines these relationships using archival data collected primarily in national archives. Austin has published work on how political contexts shape the civic and political participation of immigrants in the U.S and has ongoing collaborative projects with mentors and colleagues. He uses both comparative-historical and advanced quantitative methods in his research and continues exploring how methodology and design allow us to equip ourselves with new tools to explore unanswered questions. Austin earned a B.A. in statistics at Williams College, and his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship.