From Precarity to Possibility: Toward a Fairer Academic Mobility Regime for Temporary Migrants
Academic mobility, whether short-term or long-term, has long been hailed as a vital driver of knowledge creation and cross-border intellectual exchange. Historically, the movement of scholars fueled innovation and collaboration across nations. Beneath this idealized narrative lies a more complex reality: temporary contracts, job instability, and structural inequalities. These challenges disproportionately affect female and migrant academics (academics who are third-country nationals/non-EU citizens) navigating unstable academic labor markets.
Today, academic mobility operates within broader economic and policy frameworks that treat mobility not only as a professional opportunity but also as a requirement for success. The archetype of the “global academic” demands constant adaptability, yet this mobility is conditioned by precarious employment and restrictive migration rules (e.g., temporary visas).
What once symbolized scholarly freedom increasingly signals a reality of discontinuous contracts, dependency, and ongoing struggles to maintain competitiveness and dignity across borders.
Temporariness and Systemic Precarity
The academic labor market has become highly unequal. The shift toward project-based funding, short-term contracts, and performance-based evaluation systems has produced an environment where sustained employment security is increasingly rare. Fixed-term contracts, such as postdoctoral fellowships or research assistant positions, are common in early and mid-career stages globally.
Within this system, temporariness becomes both a condition and a disciplinary tool: a mechanism of governance that fosters productivity through uncertainty while making life stability difficult for early-career scholars. Precarity is normalized as a result.
For academics moving between countries, temporary contracts have additional consequences. In many countries in the Global North, work permits are often tied to employment contracts, creating a direct dependency between legal status and job continuity. Losing one’s academic position frequently means losing one’s right to reside in the host country.
Third-country academics are particularly vulnerable to bureaucratic constraints and limited access to social protection. These conditions entangle intellectual labor with existential insecurity, reshaping academic experience into one of continuous struggles to be flexible rather than commitment to steady professional evolution.
The temporal logic of academic life, “publish, relocate, and secure the next short-term position,” creates a persistent sense of volatility. For many, this rhythm undermines the ability to plan and transfer families or invest in or become a part of the local communities. Academic temporariness thus extends beyond employment precariousness; it becomes a life condition, structuring social belonging and personal identity within ever-changing and ambiguous mobility contexts.
Temporariness as Structure, not a Transitory Phase
It is tempting to view temporary academic positions as just a step toward stable positions. But evidence increasingly shows that temporary work is now built into the system. Universities depend on rotating bodies of scholars to sustain research output without incurring the costs of secure employment. Similarly, migration systems valorize temporary stays over permanent settlement to maintain flexibility in labor supply.
This institutionalized temporariness perpetuates inequality through a division between those with permanent job security (tenured) and those on short-term or insecure contracts (non-tenured), local and foreign, male and female, citizen and non-citizen academics. It also perpetuates hierarchies in whose knowledge counts and creates a segmented labor market, where the use of varied contract types facilitates a “divide and rule” dynamic.
The Political Economy of Mobility Reinforcing Temporariness
Academic labor is embedded within the broader political economy of migration. States and institutions benefit from the cheap, flexible intellectual labor provided by international scholars, often funded by external grants and self-financed mobility. Universities rely on postdoctoral researchers and adjunct staff to sustain research output while minimizing long-term obligations. Simultaneously, immigration regimes classify these scholars under “temporary skilled worker” categories that provide limited and often insufficient labor protections.
This situational mismatch between the high skills of migrants and the temporary nature of their employment produces what has been called the “highly skilled precariat” (Hari, Nardon, Palic 2025). Academic migrants are paradoxically celebrated for their intellectual capital yet constrained by institutional and policy frameworks that deny them permanence and belonging. Employers and states externalize the risks of mobility onto the individual scholar, who bears the emotional, financial, and logistical burden of relocation, visa maintenance, and job insecurity.
Gendered and Exacerbated Precarity: Intersectionality in Academia
Gender is a key factor in shaping inequality within academic mobility. Women, particularly migrant women scholars, experience precarity not merely as job insecurity but as a multilayered form of exclusion embedded within institutional, economic, and cultural systems (Samuk, Burchi and Kalocsanyiova, 2023).
Research demonstrates that female academics face both direct discrimination and structural incompatibilities between career demands and caregiving responsibilities (Ahmad, 2017). In practice, career advancement frameworks continue to reward uninterrupted productivity and mobility, conditions often incompatible with maternity leave, partner relocation, or eldercare responsibilities. As a result, women often overextend themselves to stay on equal footing with their male counterparts, leading to burnout, stress, and, in many cases, quitting their careers.
It should be added that this problem outlined above is a small part of a major problem that is the result of intersectionality in the context of highly skilled migration. When highly skilled women migrate under family visas as partners or spouses, the so-called “legal” dependency, although often temporary, serves to reinforce entrenched gender hierarchies and restricts their professional autonomy.
This dependency frequently results in women being perceived and treated as “dependents” by institutional actors such as immigration authorities and employers (Samuk and Daouk-Öyry, 2026, forthcoming). Conversely, when the woman is the principal migrant, this “unusual” situation challenges existing bureaucratic frameworks, creating an anomaly for which authorities are often unprepared.
Highly skilled female migrants, including academics, face significant barriers to labor market inclusion in both scenarios, whether as dependents or as principal movers, due to a mismatch between legal and social unpreparedness of the superstructure (e.g., laws, policies, regulations) and the socioeconomic realities of the infrastructure (e.g., the wish to become independent and flourish in careers).
Toward Forms of Mobility That Promote Equality and Justice
Addressing the precarity of migrant academics, particularly women, requires coordinated policies spanning labor, higher education, and immigration sectors. Extending residence and work rights beyond contract durations, de-genderizing family reunification policies, perceiving and treating women as the “main movers,” and promoting “shared” caregiving responsibilities within careers can reduce gendered disadvantages.
Academic mobility fosters creativity while perpetuating inequality through temporary contracts, tied visas, and gendered power imbalances. This transforms mobility into an ongoing negotiation for recognition and socioeconomic stability. Confronting this paradox is vital for fostering an inclusive and just academic landscape.
Şahizer Samuk Carignani is a postdoctoral researcher (Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow) at the BI Norwegian Business School & University of Padova.
References:
–Ahmad, S. (2017). Family or future in the academy?. Review of Educational Research, 87 (1), 204-239.
–Hari, A., Nardon, L., & Palic, D. (2025). Doubly precarious immigrant academics: professional identities and work integration of a highly skilled precariat in Canadian higher education. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 44(3), 257-271.
–Hennebry, J., Gordon, M., & Samuk, Ş. (Eds.). (2026). Handbook of temporary migration governance. Edward Elgar Publishing. (Forthcoming)
–Samuk, Ş., Burchi, S., & Kalocsányiová, E. (2023). Work and gender in the context of spatial mobility and migration: The case of highly skilled Italians abroad. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 24(4), 1547–1569.
–Samuk, S. and Daouk-Öyry, L. (2026). A gendered perspective on experiences of temporariness among Highly Skilled Migrants: Dilemmas and paradoxes. In J. Hennebry, M. Gordon, & Ş. Samuk (Eds.), Handbook of temporary migration governance. Edward Elgar Publishing. (Forthcoming).
Go back to our blog series on International Academic Mobility.
