International mobility of early-career researchers: macro structures and agential practices

• In Event: The opportunity and challenge of academic mobility: Experiences of students, early career researchers, and spouses

Proposal

Early-career researchers (ECRs) are a group of academic members with substantial population size, usually highly diverse in terms of nationality especially in major host countries in Global North, yet receiving much less attention than international Bachelor and Master students and faculty members in general. While cross-border mobility is commonly framed as an unconditional good, especially in political discourse, ECRs tend to be more prone to precarity influenced by the neoliberal trend and the rise of academic capitalism. A nuanced understanding of academic mobility among ECRs needs to be developed.
This study sets out to understand the patterns and rationales of international mobility among ECRs, their experience, and how the contextual structures shape and are potentially shaped by their agentive practices in the face of changing landscape of internationalisation of higher education (HE). China and the UK are chosen as the two research sites. China is the largest sending country with a rising trend of repatriation from Global North, while the UK is one of the major host countries with almost the highest percentage of international ECRs with its HE system being heavily influenced by the neoliberal discourse. The study focuses on the interaction of national structural constraints and enablements for internationally-trained Chinese ECRs, revealing the complex picture behind their choices to stay in the host country, to return to China, or even to re-expatriate to the Global North. It reveals the struggles of ECRs in neoliberal-influenced HE systems of both UK and China, and their negotiation with macro structures through individual reflexivity and collective actions.
This empirical study reconciles ontological Critical Realism and epistemic relativism through comparative case study. Glonacal agency heuristic is adopted as the conceptual framework, with a particular focus on the national and local level, and the layers and conditions contributing to the contextual structures of both UK and China (Marginson & Rhodes, 2002). Policies relating to ECR attraction, recruitment, retention, and development are analyzed. For more in-depth investigation, semi-structured interviews are conducted with both administrators and ECRs cross disciplines, genders, and ages to study the structural impact and individuals’ motives and experiences. They are not viewed as existing independently from the reciprocal forces and the intersections with wider macro-structural context. Instead, the perceptions, reactions, and decision-making of internationally mobile ECRs are constantly shaped by the structures, which manifests in their huge diversities across cultural backgrounds, demographics, and field of academia. This study is highly relevant to the sub-theme 3 (Theories, Methodologies and Protest) of the CIES 2024 conference, investigating the power of macro structures, and the resistance, struggle, defiance, compliance, and transcendence of ECRs in their academic profession.
The preliminary findings suggest that the mobility or precarity issue intertwined with financial, political, and cultural factors, presenting a complex picture for the international mobility of ECRs. The precarity issue in neoliberal universities in the UK negatively affect the tendency of stay for internationally-trained Chinese ECRs especially in non-STEM disciplines. With the increasing difficulty in securing a “iron rice bowl” (a permanent job) in UK universities, they tend to opt for returning to China to climb up the academic ladder starting at an early career stage for the accumulation of domestic professional social capital. However, for ECRs in STEM disciplines, while they tend to be attracted to the salary and benefit package offered Chinese government, they are also adversely affected by the tenure system adopted in some of the Chinese universities that highly emphasizes performance metrics. The free academic environment and a relatively professional, as opposed to personal, work relationships with colleagues in the UK tend to empower ECRs for knowledge production. On the contrary, the returning ECRs in China tend to experience acculturation and re-adaptation difficulties, which they managed to address through creating a transnational space to mediate between the two distinct types of interpersonal relationships.

Author

• Yuqing Huang, The University of Edinburgh