“Enough Wandering Around!”: Life Trajectories, Mobility, and Place Making in Neoliberal Academia (original) (raw)

My best Geographer’s Dress: Bodies, Emotions and Care in Early-career Academia

2019

In this paper, we draw on our personal experiences with the perpetuating gender bias in (early-career) academia, more specifically within geography. We develop two main arguments. First, we argue that everyday academic practices stand in sharp contrast with the critical content geography, as a discipline, aims to study and teach - including its feminist, anti-colonial, and queer understandings. Strikingly, geography as a field does not seem able to apply its academic insights into its internal organisation. Indeed, everyday academic practices within geography reproduce structural gendered inequalities. Consequently, geography reproduces the historical ‘maleness’ of the discipline, both in terms of who embodies it and through the methods and topics it focuses on. Second, we reflect on the strategies we develop to denounce and alter the unjust practices we are confronted with. Yet, these strategies reveal the double bind early career women face, as these very strategies may risk to undermine one’s own precarious position, or to give the skewed impression of reproducing the male, disembodied ideal we are fighting.

Spaces of (Non-)Belonging: Lived Experience of Academic Mobility in the Time of Shrinking Cosmopolitanism

Spaces of (Non-)Belonging: Lived Experience of Academic Mobility in the Time of Shrinking Cosmopolitanism, 2021

Academic mobility has been theorized in terms of internalization of knowledge, globalization and cosmopolitanism, as a means to foster similarities between systems and cultures of higher education, and to neutralize tensions between them, encouraging trust and promoting cooperation and exchange worldwide. As a Western social ideology, cosmopolitanism has stimulated global interconnectedness by creating conditions for a transnational mobility of people, goods, information, and knowledge. For the past several years, however, we have witnessed various forces emerge—such as the rise of conservative values nourishing populist, xenophobic, and separatist sentiments—that have radically challenged its social-political currency, questioning its ideological validity as a shared philosophy of communal growth. This has increasingly laid bare large-scale social-economic inequalities, and intensified political struggles between and within countries, all the while revealing major structural problems that considerably impact the process of international academic exchange and mobility. On the whole, this research project is configured as an exploration of the limits of cosmopolitanism within the contemporary, turbulent, geo-political context. Zooming in on my lived experience as a foreign mobile student, I aim to bring in and examine my own personal perspective in an autoethnographic and critical fashion. Heuristically, I will work with affect theory in order to elucidate my—spatially diversified and determined—experience of ‘non-belonging’ that this international environment has triggered. Consequently, and particularly, the main objective will be to critically account for my embodied entanglement with the spaces I have inhabited for the past one year and a half, analyzing the ways they have shaped my experience as an international mobile student. The project adapts a critical discourse analysis of selected (social) media communication of political events in Brazil, Poland, France and Spain that have influenced me the most over the course of my academic mobility period. Contributing to a personalized and (auto)critical account of my experience of academic mobility, this research project aspires to generate a new understanding of international academic mobility and the challenges this produces in the time of shrinking cosmopolitanism. Key words: academic mobility, affect, belonging, cosmopolitanism, space.

Internationally mobile academics: Hierarchies, hegemony, and the geo- scientific imagination

A B S T R A C T The global migration of academic researchers and staff tends to follow a geographical hierarchy that has the USA at its centre. In this paper, we apply Gramsci's concept of hegemony to explore the way in which the geo-scientific imagination of mobile researchers endorses hierarchies and asymmetries of the international academic system. While academic institutions and practices can be considered instruments for the organization and reproduction of hegemonic relations in civil society, this paper addresses hegemonic relations within the international academic system itself. An analysis of 42 interviews with mobile academics based in Canada and Germany affirms how mobile academics consent to the reproduction of a hegemonic academic hierarchy of countries. At the same time, however, the analysis reveals differentiated views that nest individual universities, departments, and disciplines in the context of national academic systems. The analysis also uncovers interesting shifts in the geo-scientific imagination of global academic hierarchies.

Academic mobility the 'other' way: Embodying simultaneous priviledge and precarity

The international academic mobility that we hear about most often concerns moving from the non-West to the West. It is far more rare for academics to go the ‘other’ way, i.e. from Western to non-Western academia. While I have been both ways, I owe the really transformative experience of my academic mobility to Tajik academia. This essay describes three of the many aspects of this formative experience, referring to the issues of mistrust, mutual favours and the culture of mediocracy. By being confronted with new academic conventions and practices, Tajik academia made me question my own positionality. It forced me to reflect on privilege and precarity which I simultaneously embodied, and offered a new perspective on Western academic culture.

Situated Researcher: A Critical Autoethnography on Migrant Researcher’s Mobility, Positionality, and Agency

Belgeo: Belgian Journal of Geography, 2024

Drawing on a critical autoethnography, this essay explores the lived experiences of a Chinese migrant researcher in Belgium and the influence of Belgium as a place of knowledge production on both the researcher and the research itself. First, it highlights the challenges of academic mobility in Europe experienced by migrant researchers in the face of the multiscalar mobility regimes, and underscores how geographic mobility intersects with social class. Second, it reveals the impact of the dual, even plural, scientific socialisation across borders on the self-refashioning and self-evaluation of researchers with migrant backgrounds. Last, the essay argues that the insider/outsider positions of researchers are not static but are constantly (re)shaped by their identities, social positions, and geographic locations – Belgium, in this case, as a place of study, residence, and knowledge production. It further emphasizes the agency of researchers in negotiating complex field relations. This essay contributes to a nuanced understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of migrant researchers in the Global North and sheds light on the role of the place of knowledge production in shaping their ways of doing research and being a researcher.

A new mobilities approach to re-examining the doctoral journey: mobility and fixity in the borderlands space

Teaching in Higher Education , 2021

This paper explores doctoral candidates’ experiences of making progress through the doctoral space. We engage concepts associated with the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm (Urry, J. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press) to provide insight into the candidate experience of the doctoral journey; exploring specifically the interplay between the fixed structure provided by institutional-level progression frameworks that are commonly implemented by UK universities to measure ‘timely progress’ across disciplines and the borderlands space that enables and facilitates intellectual freedom, creativity, becoming and adventure. Drawing on notions of ‘moorings’, ‘home on the move’, ‘connectivity and transit spaces’ and ‘rhizomic thinking’ we analyse narrative data generated through the reflective diaries of doctoral candidates at a modern university in the English Midlands to offer new insight into how universities can provide better doctoral education, that supports: candidates to make a contribution to knowledge; protects well-being; and facilitates timely completion.

Human Geography Making the Invisible Visible: Knowledge production and the gendered power nexus in critical urban studies

Human Geography, 2019

This paper employs the concept of "invisible colleges" to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as "invisible colleges". The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and "double dipping", or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a concept that has largely escaped attention in urban studies and geography, we highlight the usefulness of visibility as a technology of equity. En route, the paper describes and visualizes some of the impacts of the proliferation of uneven knowledge production through the coalescing of factors such as path dependency, cumulative advantage, expected inequality and the Matthew and Matilda Effects.