Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe - cover image

Copyright

Olga Burlyuk; Ladan Rahbari;

Published On

2023-05-11

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80064-923-1
Hardback978-1-80064-924-8
PDF978-1-80064-925-5
HTML978-1-80064-929-3
XML978-1-80064-928-6
EPUB978-1-80064-926-2

Language

  • English

Print Length

280 pages (xxxii+248)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 20 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.79" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 24 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.94" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback401g (14.14oz)
Hardback714g (25.19oz)

OCLC Number

1385453015

LCCN

2022361803

BIC

  • JFFN
  • JFSJ
  • MBPK
  • JHBL
  • JFSL1

BISAC

  • SOC007000
  • SOC032000
  • MED102000
  • EDU014000
  • EDU040000

LCC

  • LB1778.4.E85

Keywords

  • narratives
  • migrant academics
  • autobiography
  • autoethnography
  • mobility
  • precarity
  • resilience
  • care
  • solidarity
  • discrimination
  • exclusion
  • intersectionality
  • gender
  • race

Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe

This volume consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins.

The authors use precarity to analyse the state of affairs in the academy, from hiring practices to ‘culturally’ accepted division of labour, systematic forms of discrimination, racialisation, and gendered hierarchies, etc. Building on precarity as a critical concept for challenging social exclusion or forming political collectives, the authors move away from conventional academic styles, instead adopting autobiography and autoethnography as methods of intersectional scholarly analysis. This approach creatively challenges the divisions between the system and the individual, the mind and the soul, the objective and the subjective, as well as science, theory, and art.

This volume will be of interest not only to scholars within the field of migration studies, but also to instructors and students of sociology, postcolonial studies, gender and race studies, and critical border studies. The volume’s interdisciplinary approach also seeks to address university diversity officers, managers, key decision-makers, and other readers directly or indirectly involved in contemporary academia. The format and style of its contributions are wide-ranging (including poetry and creative prose), thus making it accessible and readable for a general audience.

Endorsements

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.

James Burford

Department of Education Studies, Warwick University

Reviews

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.

Dounia Bourabain

"Our stories matter: Why migrant academics’ narratives are key to organization studies". Organization, doi:10.1177/13505084241265223

Full Review

Contents

3. Unlearning

(pp. 21–30)
  • Mihnea Tănăsescu
  • Dragana Stojmenovska

11. Becoming White?

(pp. 105–116)
  • Apostolos Andrikopoulos
  • Alexander Strelkov

Afterword

(pp. 225–230)
  • Umut Erel

Contributors

Olga Burlyuk

(editor)
Assistant Professor of Europe’s external relations at the Department of Political Science at University of Amsterdam

Ladan Rahbari

(editor)
Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology at University of Amsterdam