My Disappointing Life

This chapter is a personal and political reckoning with three decades as a migrant academic in the United States. Moving from wartime Sarajevo to a tenured post in Florida, it interweaves memoir with a feminist political economy critique of U.S. higher education. It traces disillusionment with the discipline of International Relations, the narrow ideological boundaries and market discipline of graduate training, and the long shadow of wars from Yugoslavia to Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza. Recasting American universities as a contemporary form of Ottoman devshirme, it situates foreign graduate students and academic migrants within global circuits of labor, precarity, and deportability. Alongside disappointment and regret, the chapter reflects on attachments to students, classrooms, and everyday life, ending with the unresolved question of why one stays in a country where one has never fully settled.