(Un)Moving Scholars Across Borders: Researchers and Their Families Facing Global Academia

• In Event: Transforming Early Academic Careers: Global Challenges and Individual Trajectories - I: Addressing Inequalities in Academic Careers

Abstract

In the last decades, the internationalisation of the academic labour market has been associated with the growing prevalence of fixed-term academic positions (Guth and Gill, 2008; Franzoni et al., 2012 ; Murgia & Poggio, 2018)
The practice of being geographically mobile often implies moving from a country to another several times in order to build academic experience or to earn a new contract - with no guarantee of getting a stable position (Morley, 2018; Jöns, 2007; Leung, 2017; Morano-Foadi, 2005).
I identify two pitfalls associated with this practice:
1 - The succession of moves with little access to what the future holds often is unsettling for the researchers and their family.
2 - Although these moves across institutions and countries stem from the idea of a “global academic market”, in reality researchers often end up caught in between heterogeneous systems with different social protection and rights.
I explore how individuals react, adjust, and sometimes subvert these pitfalls through the analysis of qualitative interviews conducted with early career researchers working in the highly international Swiss academic system.
I use a case study methodology to analyze in particular the effects of the above-mentioned phenomenon on the trajectories of academics who are mobile as a couple (either living together, or living apart) and on the decision of having a child beyond or across borders.
A part of the findings is presented in the form of a comic strip. I explore the use of comic narratives as an innovative tool in case study methodology and emphasize the possibilities this medium offers to display research findings to a wider audience (Mickwitz 2016).

Author

• Marie Sautier, University of Lausanne/Sciences Po Paris