Paper long abstract:

Seemingly privileged, often associated with cosmopolitanism and freedom of movement academic professionals today make most temporally, spatially fragmented, and geographically displaced hyper-mobile labouring subjects. They, like other mobile professionals, strive to synchronize personal life in an interplay with structural forces that dictate tempos and forms of mobility that in turn determine their career progress. The academic career is seen as predominantly infused with linearity, accumulation of experience and skills in terms of hierarchical development, or status and positionality. The imagined ideal straight path - from obtaining a doctoral degree to obtaining a full professorship - does not fit into the reality of the flexibly changing demands of the contemporary academic world of work as the accelerating tempos of careers are not always compatible with the rhythmicity of academic personal lives. Tackling this empirical conundrum, this paper aims to show the impact of mobility on the ability of academics to deal simultaneously with critical events in their private lives and career requirements taking into account personal circumstances such as academic career stage, age, dis/ability, gender, citizenship, etc. Anthropological research on the academic world of work that captures the relation between experienced mobility, its regulation and policy discourses, and the dynamic interaction between mobility and immobility over the life-career course is generally lacking. Approaching academic career trajectories with intersectional theoretical sensitivity and with consideration of complex and ambivalent demands on the individual, yet class- and gender-bound biographies yields a richer and more nuanced understanding of academics’ navigation through the academic life-career (im)mobilities.