Paper short abstract:

Although mobility is highly valued and aspired by anthropologists for their work, contemporary visa and residency regulation can act as career obstacles. My paper analyses mobility impediments faced by non-Australian anthropologists in Australia based on auto-ethnographic experiences.

Paper long abstract:

Mobility is a basic necessity for those who want to study others. Anthropologists have embraced temporary migration (ideally in should still spend 1 year in the field) as an essential ingredient of their methodological tool kit, ever since arm chair anthropology was denounced as insufficient and superficial. In order to keep mobile and thus be able to conduct ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists also need time and funding, often more than other social scientists might require for similar studies. Time is limited due to teaching commitments and receiving grants is getting ever more competitive nowadays. So when the chance (funding and time) materializes, one has to make use of it.

However, there are additional obstacles to mobility for some anthropologists. For example, Muslim anthropologists have been blocked from attending conferences in the US. Moreover, anthropologists who happen to have a migrant background themselves face impediments to their mobility, such as having to meet the residency requirements for the visa they are on that allows them to work legally at a university that is in a country which is not their country of citizenship. For those who aspire to convert their precarious migratory status as a temporary resident into a permanent citizen, residency requirements make intense fieldwork impossible. Based on auto-ethnographic experiences I will analyze the mobility impediments faced by non-Australian anthropologists in Australia.