Paper Short Abstract:

The contibution examines immobility as a choice among research workers. Focusing on international scholars in Japan and Latvia, I suggest that research workers and people important to them make (im)mobility decisions together, often prioritizing personal ties over potential future career advancement

Paper Abstract:

This contribution examines the tension between two contradictory factors shaping the (im)mobility of researcher workers: the demands of the dominant regimes of knowledge production and the importance of building and maintaining close relationships. At the discursive level, the “ideal” researcher is often portrayed as someone unencumbered by close personal ties and dedicating their life to science. The lived reality for many scholars, however, is quite different, as they struggle to balance their work and personal lives.

Based on semi-structured interviews with international scholars in Japan and Latvia as well as other ethnographic data, I suggest that personal considerations—relationships, kin ties, and the hope of creating them—constitute an important factor for research workers as they make decisions about their actual and potential employment locales. Rather than necessarily prioritizing the potentiality of movements to the “centers” of academic knowledge production, researchers often choose to cease the mobility expected of them by the contemporary regime of knowledge production and instead opt to remain in places significant in terms of personal ties—and places that may enable the creation of new relationships or the maintenance of already established ones. Turning the analytical lens to how mobility decisions are co-made by researchers and people close to them, opens a novel angle for examining the institutional and policy assumptions about academic mobility.