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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how transnational professionals within European academia negotiate fragmented workplaces, uneven digital demands and shifting regimes of recognition.

Paper long abstract

Remote and hybrid academic work has unsettled long-standing assumptions about mobility, presence and belonging within European universities. Once grounded in shared physical spaces and collegial rhythms, academic labour is now reorganised through digital infrastructures that promise flexibility while generating new forms of fragmentation, precarity and affective ambivalence. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Slovenia with lecturers, researchers, administrators and early-career academics, this paper explores how digital platforms, institutional metrics and hybrid work arrangements reshape everyday academic life and the conditions under which people sustain professional identities and attachments.

Participants describe a university environment marked by ambiguous connectivities: they are continuously connected yet feel increasingly disconnected from colleagues, students and organisational life. Hybrid work expands possibilities for cross-border collaboration but also intensifies temporal pressures, erodes boundaries between life and labour and deepens inequalities between those with stable positions and those navigating precarious contracts or migratory trajectories. Digitalisation amplifies surveillance through performance indicators, automated reporting systems and expectations of permanent availability, producing forms of affective and epistemic precarity.

For migrant and mobile academics, hybridity generates additional layers of uncertainty regarding recognition, integration and institutional belonging. Rather than a neutral technological shift, hybrid academic work emerges as a socio-technical infrastructure through which regimes of visibility, value and legitimacy are reconfigured.

By situating these experiences within broader debates on labour, mobility and digital governance, the paper argues that contemporary academic work demands an anthropology attentive to the infrastructural, affective and political stakes of remote and hybrid environments.