Fading Career Prospects of Mobility Researchers “Stuck” in Immobility?
What happens when you are researching a topic that is suddenly suspended and prone to alter fundamentally in the future? How are the early career prospects of mobility researchers and their sense of purpose when getting “stuck” and isolated in an unfamiliar place? While the “new normal” and its implications to our study fields, and the academia at large, are still to be seen, it seems difficult to continue and completely re-think personal arrangements, research endeavors, and professional plans.
We are three women of different ages, origins and backgrounds, all carrying dual citizenships that gave us the privilege to travel internationally relatively freely in the past. We are early-career researchers with different academic affiliations, who have all experienced international mobility and migration over many years ourselves. As part of an international research project called GLOMO (Global Mobility of Employees), a Marie-Sklodowska Curie action funded by the EU Horizon2020 program, we study the phenomenon of global mobile workers and labor migration.
Since 2018, we have been living what we were researching, and we can therefore personally relate to our research field: having moved to new “host” countries for the project and committing to two international assignments during our PhDs. However, with the spread of the new coronavirus, suddenly the privilege of always being on the move, always socializing and networking disappeared due to closed borders and pandemic threats. The very purpose and meaning of our research project faded away.
The Irony of Globally Mobile Researchers Suddenly Stuck in Immobility
When it all started in March 2020, we were temporarily hosted at partner institutions in Germany and Finland, away from our home universities in France, Denmark and the UK where we had settled since 2018. The pandemic affected our mobilities and careers in different ways. We had to interrupt our 2020 research- stay, cancel our 2021 field research work and corporate secondments, as it became clear that the situation would last. Instead of regular in-person events, project meetings, seasonal schools and conferences transformed into online formats and, of course, we found ourselves isolated endlessly working from home, separated from colleagues, away from our families, away from the places that we refer to as “home.”
Despite the lock-down, all of us had, fortunately, virtual contact with the outside world, either via old-fashioned phone calls or video calls allowing us to strongly feel that we are all in this together. Social networks and messengers became the go-to places for all of us Generation Y phone junkies, right after our favorite news sites in different languages that we checked on average 222 times a day. One of the ways that we used to cope was a weekly informal video-call where we, a group of eight fellow researchers, shared our fears and frustrations. We expressed our feelings over this brand-new uncertain world we are now living in, and terms such as quarantine, self-isolation, social distancing, and PCR (polymerase chain reaction) became part of our everyday language. These get-togethers were a significant mental support that put us back on track and into a more favorable mood.
Loneliness, Disrupted Mental States and Obscure Future Employment Prospects
The Ph.D. journey is a very lonely one by nature, where one has to work most of the time alone on one’s research for years. Office life and research group meetings are essential to creating a sense of belonging to the research community when one joins academia as a newby. In the corporate world, which some of us have known in the past, working on group projects and in teams are much more common. Therefore, we relished being members of a Horizon2020 project among 15 early- career researchers in a comparably comfortable situation. Until March 2020, we had very regular get-togethers for seasonal schools and colloquia and could thereby share experiences and research insights. This crucial exchange notwithstanding, the feeling of loneliness persisted to some extent, as our research work remains very individual. Writing is often a solitary and demanding mental exercise that requires a lot of clarity and peace of mind. Unlike any repetitive task, it is a creative process that can easily get disrupted. Moreover, research, especially at the initial stages of a Ph.D., requires a lot of self-discipline. It took us some time to find the proper routine to be productive.
And then the pandemic hit, disrupting our daily routines and adding extra pressure to perform – because work was the only activity left to us. Suspended field research and the obligation to identify alternative ways of collecting data virtually added to this pressure. Since the covid-19 pandemic, we have also experienced an even stronger disconnection as the possibility of traveling and going to the offices was suspended. It altered our perceptions of time and space and reinforced the feeling of being lost and alone. While corporate employees have daily calls, meetings and chats, we found ourselves in limbo. We looked for ways to stay productive despite the lockdowns, to reduce the feeling of isolation, and to strengthen the belonging to the (now virtual) academic community. One of us, for instance, engaged in online writing groups, organized on the Meet-up platform for Ph.D.s and Postdocs around the world.
Most employment conditions of Ph.D. candidates are precarious, as they are limited in time and often underpaid. This makes individuals in Ph.D. positions vulnerable, despite being highly qualified and experienced. The funding for our project is going to run out in August 2021. Advanced positions are scarce in Academia in general and the lack of networking opportunities, paired with immigration restrictions in the destination countries, we had in mind contributes to an increasing sense of insecurity. Despite all these difficulties, we try to keep on track and complete our PhDs in time, also to safeguard future career options in times of eonomic recession.
We continuously support each other, by sharing and reflecting on daily challenges and by attempting to find a positive twist to the situation. It also made us aware of how lucky we have been to lead internationally mobile lives as junior academics. It is true that the privilege of free movement has been taken away from us by the pandemic and affected our well-being and career prospects. However, in the meanwhile, new learning opportunities have emerged, which will certainly enrich our research perspectives on migration and mobility. It became more affordable for instance to attend conferences as travel costs completely disappeared, although the virtual experience is far from being comparable to the real-life experience. Moreover, we managed to take part in academic networks that used to host only residents, as they used to meet only in person, and now broadened their scope by hosting online meetings. So, in a sense, the pandemic broadened peoples’ perspectives of doing research. Whether our careers will pay the price of the pandemic is still to be confirmed, but the anxiety is definitely there…
Kerstin Martel, Acil Abdul Hadi and Monique Raupp are PhD Candidates in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action “Global Mobility of Employees” (GLOMO), a Horizon 2020-funded international research project with a focus on global mobility into EU countries and within the EU and its impact on careers. Monique Raupp is based at the Cranfield University (UK) and focusing on the research topic of globally mobile individuals and more specifically in expatriate research. Acil Abdul Hadi is particularly interested in the careers of highly skilled migrants and expatriates.
