Immobilized by the Pandemic | Moving Forward in Academia
Academic mobility is often a prerequisite for professional development and career advancement for early- career scholars. The immobility created by the global pandemic disrupted and challenged this mobility, while simultaneously inciting a reappreciation of the interactions it used to fuel. What are the consequences of immobility from a personal perspective and how does it perpetuate global inequality in higher education?
It was an exciting prospect. In January 2020, I had been selected for a competitive fellowship at a leading research center in my field. I was to start working there in late spring 2020, so during the last few months before moving I devised elaborate plans on the many activities, encounters, and goals for this limited but hopefully intensive work stay. Joyful anticipation was in the air.
In early spring, however, the pandemic hit Western Europe, and I found my carefully crafted plans of moving countries frozen indefinitely. Instead of embarking on long discussions of the latest developments in my field with new colleagues, I was confined home, worried about close family members vulnerable to this new virus called SARS-CoV-2.
Beyond rendering my organizing efforts futile, I worried about the lack of progress in my work, and about missing on chances to advance my career. All of this was loosely overshadowed by anxiety about fundamental changes to job markets, and the social relations we were going to find ourselves living in after this time of lockdown.
Between Mobility and Education – Prerequisite, Driver, Outcome
In Western Europe, educational mobility is a vital transition for many young people during which they acquire the skills for professional life and emancipate themselves from their family settings.
The estimated birth of more than one million ‘Erasmus Babies’ testifies to the profound and lasting effects such international academic mobility has on European youth. To me, academic mobility means that I have spent more than 8 years of my adult life living outside my country of birth. It also means that my presentation skills are better in English than in my first language, I have friends in most EU member states, I can swear in Romanian, and cook with hot pepper and garlic as much as with capers and cream.
And while educational mobility is ever-increasing among young people globally, a much smaller percentage of these choose to make ‘education’ and ‘research’ their profession.
With the transition to becoming-an-academic, often further mobility is involved: pursuing a Ph.D. at specialized and renowned institutes abroad, embarking on longer fieldwork to collect data, or traveling to conferences and workshops in our respective fields, and eventually another relocation to take up a postdoctoral or another junior position.
Mobility is not just a result of education, and a side-effect of a career in higher education, it is often a prerequisite for embarking on such a career path in the first place.
Mobility as Privilege, Mobility as Pleasure
The current pandemic has changed the way academic career trajectories progress and the kind of mobility needed to access them – an interruption, I could feel with the suspension of my fellowship. I was stuck without a prospect of moving on anytime soon, and without the perspective of finding an equivalent job outside of academia. At the best of times, I tried to value this involuntary pause of my plans, as a moment for appreciating life in the moment. Yet, it was overshadowed by uncertainty and anxiety for a future that had seemed so close ahead but had become unattainable.
Experiencing the effects of this immobilization on my trajectory, I observed a novel set of ‘mobility rules’, different from those imposed upon me by my gender, nationality, or other attributes. Abiding by this new set of rules underlined the value of previously taken-for-granted mobility. Having perceived the various forms of mobility that my status as a junior academic afforded me – conferences, summer schools, fieldwork, fellowships – merely as a pleasurable side-effect, I now regard them as a precious privilege. Friends asked me whether my research on migration governance had not prepared me for the effects of mobility restrictions. I chuckled, but inside I struggled to come to terms with how ignorant I had been about the realities of many colleagues who faced restrictions to their (academic) mobility long before this current pandemic. I simply had never questioned their and my own access to mobility.
Therefore, the pandemic acted as a powerful reminder of the inequality of global mobility regimes and access to education, highlighting the dissonance between an increasingly internationalizing and diversifying academia, and the hierarchical effects of inequality and immobility. This effect that I experienced during the pandemic had preexisted as a structuring reality for so many of my colleagues around the world.
Moving (Away From) Inequality
If the process of becoming-an-academic will rely less and less on actual physical mobility in the unfolding of this pandemic, how will socialization into different departmental and national academic cultures be achieved? While entailing new ways of creating and curating personal networks may cut across former boundaries, they would bring to the fore novel questions of access and exclusion. The pandemic will not abolish mechanisms of advancing some over others, but it will certainly redraw the boundary-making processes currently in place. The way that universities will grant access to their knowledge production in the future, the departmental attitude towards engaging in exchange, and the personal abilities of researchers to enter productive work relationships are all part of this redrawing.
Ultimately, I was able to venture over the border to embark on this new chapter of building relations. Fearful of being held back by a second wave, I crossed the border in August without as much as having my passport checked. I had the privilege and the pleasure to have enjoyed many coffees with fellow researchers over our different writing strategies, the coding of the data, or local integration concepts. But the pandemic has acted as a powerful reminder of the existing inequalities in access to mobility and its lasting effects on personal development and career paths. Our lives are built on this very premise of being mobile, so how will academia change if this mobility can no longer be taken for granted?
The original version of this article was published in the Routed.Migration & (Im)Mobility Magazine.
Jenna Althoff is an advanced PhD candidate at Central European University (CEU), Budapest/Hungary, and founder of CEU’s migration research group. She has been a visiting research fellow with the nccr – on the move and is currently a guest researcher with the Interdisciplinary Center for Integration and Migration Research (InZentIM) at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. For her curated selection of information related to migration & mobility, join her on Facebook under: Migration Policy in a European Context.
Acknowledgements: Her thanks go to the whole nccr – on the move team and specifically Prof. Gianni D’Amato for facilitating the fellowship, which has also provided the inspiration for this article.
