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Move or Perish? The Transnational Mobility of Researchers in Swiss Academia Marie Sautier, University of Lausanne
Wednesday 19th June, 4-5pm, Room TBC
Co-hosted AMIN & Centre for Applied Linguistics Seminar
Abstract
Even though considered a global phenomenon, the internationalization of researchers varies widely between countries. In Switzerland, a particularly competitive and attractive academic environment in which more than 50% of the academic workforce comes from foreign countries, local researchers are highly encouraged to move abroad for some time; especially at the beginning of their career. Our study aimed at exploring the geographical trajectories of young researchers working in the Swiss academic context through their lived experience. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 65 semi-structured interviews featuring post-doctoral researchers of various nationalities, scientific fields, and family arrangements, we analysed how female and male researchers negotiate the institutional pressures to be geographically mobile with their own scientific, professional, and private concerns. We used ideal-types in our analysis to get beyond the traditional binary opposition of mobile and immobile. We employed a new theoretical framework based on the concept of 鈥渕otility鈥� (Kaufmann, 2002) that allowed us to go beyond a representation of mobility as a 鈥渕ove across spaces.鈥� Instead, we considered mobility in both its practical and aspirational dimensions. Through the concepts of 鈥�蝉迟颈肠办测鈥� and 鈥�蝉迟耻肠办,鈥� we show how mobility as a practice and mobility as an aspiration are intertwined with personal and social characteristics on one hand, and institutional and career logics on the other hand.
Marie Sautier is a PhD candidate at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations, Sciences Po Paris (France) and at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Her research interests include the trajectories of researchers in life-course perspective, academic careers, the internationalisation of HE, gender equality policies and the use of ethnography in sociology. She participated in the Garcia project, an extensive EU research initiative that focused on gendered career trajectories in different countries, and also took part in a cross-national pilot study (UCL) exploring the perceived impact of the 2016 Brexit referendum on higher education circulation in Europe. Her PhD research focuses on the geographical mobility of early career researchers in cross-national perspective.