Paper Short Abstract:

Based on semi-structured interviews with researchers in various national contexts, I examine the relationship between mobility, anxiety and scholarly, including ethnographic, writing.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I examine the relationship between mobility, anxiety and scholarly writing, including the knowledge produced by anthropologists. I explore how the contemporary mobility imperative that accompanies the neoliberalization of academic work engenders a profound sense of uncertainty and anxiety among research workers and shapes what and how is being written—and remains unwritten. Taking semi-structured interviews and unstructured conversations with international researchers in various national contexts as a departure point and interweaving my own experiences as a researcher on a fixed-term contract, I suggest that it is impossible to uncouple researchers’ writing—as well as the lack of it—from the institutional contexts, terms of employment, bureaucratic frameworks, and mobility regimes within which they work. While writing—in the form of high-impact research publications and grant proposals—is expected at an unprecedented pace and intensity in contemporary regimes of knowledge production, the same framewok engenders anxiety-ridden forms of the unwritten.