Travelling in time, between places, and jobs: exploring temporal dimensions of academics’ international trajectories

Abstract

Based on the assumption that mobility has both spatial and temporal dimensions, the aim of this paper is to bring forth the often-neglected temporal dimensions of international academic mobility. We explore how time and temporality plays a role in the decisions and lived lives of international academics by analysing their experiences and mobility trajectories. We do so by drawing on qualitative interviews with 21 international academics differing in age, nationality, and career level employed at three Danish universities. The analysis shows that for many of our participants, mobility had little to do with internationalisation of higher education rationales. Rather their mobility rationales were embedded in personal needs and wants, often related to securing permanence for the less privileged and related to experiences and adventure for the privileged. By unfolding the stories about which decisions, coincidence, and sacrifices are part of academic mobile life, we show how citizenship-based hierarchies lead to spatial and temporal inequalities. The paper concludes that for the international academics, places are positioned not only geographically but also temporally in hierarchical ways and that the individual mobility trajectories are differently entangled in a global-temporal orientation.