Paper short abstract:

When academics move to new countries for work, as is increasingly common, academic identities can be challenged. This paper explores the invisible identity work I observed foreign academics in Vietnam undertake, in order to successfully navigate their new international environments.

Paper long abstract:

Global competition for academic jobs is intensifying, and as it does, academics are increasingly required to shift their dominant places of residence across national borders in order to remain in academia. My research explores this global phenomenon through an ethnography of the invisible work (Star & Strauss, 1999) being undertaken by the foreign academics at an international university campus in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (the International-Vietnamese University, or IVU). Invisible work — the work that must be done in order for a task to be completed successfully, but is not necessarily accounted for in job descriptions or work plans — comes in many forms, and in this paper I will focus on one in particular: Identity Work.

By privileging the descriptions given by the academic participants in my anthropological study during fieldwork in 2016, I will unpack both what is meant by the notion of academic identity in this environment, and what 'work' the academics of IVU are doing to produce and reproduce their identities in relation to their new, highly internationalised professional context.

Drawing together the literatures on invisible work, identity work and academic identity, and placing these within the context of the anthropology of academia, this paper asks "how do academics' self perceptions change when they move countries for their jobs, and what work do they have to do under these circumstances to maintain, repair, strengthen or adapt a coherent sense of self?"