For many years now, knowledge production at universities and in countries like Vietnam has been framed by centre/periphery discourses. In this paper, we suggest that interpreting academics' research identities in relation to these discourses can assist in understanding ways in which Vietnamese academics negotiate knowledge production. For this article, data on six participants are drawn from a qualitative study in which semi-structured interviews were used to investigate the positioning of different generations of academics working in the area of social sciences, in Vietnam or in the diaspora. Findings from this data revealed that senior researchers positioned their own local knowledge and experiences as central to what they perceived to be the betterment of Vietnam. In contrast, early and mid-career academics, especially those who studied in Western countries, looked outward to apply Western research frameworks to the Vietnamese context, placing Vietnam in a more peripheral position in the global academic community.