Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe

This is an important collection which asks readers to consider the diversity and complexity of individual academic migrants’ experiences as well as consistent themes across their stories which call for scholarly attention. Through their narratives, the authors illustrate the ordinary costs and brutality of borders and visa regimes and how precarity within the academic profession may be heightened for academic migrants positioned at the intersection of categories of difference. While focused on the narratives of precarity and resilience, the book also shares moments of joy, desire, pleasure, and curiosity that academics found in becoming scholars on the move.

The book’s primary strength lies in its goal to decolonize the academic discourse on migration. While the theoretical and practical understandings of decolonial research are subject to debate, Burlyuk and Rahbari achieve their decolonial objective by employing storytelling, thereby allowing migrant academics to share their personal experiences. This approach effectively challenges the expectation of producing ‘cool’, ‘detached’, and ‘objective’ analyses of the positionality of migration academics within Global North institutions. By claiming academic space in this innovative manner, the book not only provides valuable insights for scholars specializing in organization, migration, and related disciplines but also remains accessible to students, policymakers, and a broader non-academic audience.