Mobilities and precarities in global academia: imaginaries, inequalities, and epistemologies between North and South

Short Abstract:

This roundtable organized by the WCAA Task Force on Precarity engages with the articulation between academic precarity and mobility between North and South in order to look at its geopolitical, epistemological, and imaginative dimensions at a global level. Long Abstract:

As academic precarity has become a major issue for European scholars, it has also emerged as a major topic in anthropological literature. However, little attention has been paid to how it intersects with global mobilities and knowledge circulation in a postcolonial global context. As recent ethnographic studies (Peacock, 2016; Ferreira, 2017) have shown, the discourse of global mobility, diversity, and cosmopolitanism has been widely appropriated by neoliberal scientific policies essentially based on precarious jobs. In this roundtable, we invite scholars from different global locations to discuss the effects of precarisation of academic labor over the reconfiguration of Global-North relations on the basis of three fundamental dimensions: (i) subjective, meaning how Southern scholars experience the possibility of making an academic career in Europe in a context of precarity; (ii) institutional, by addressing the role played (as well as possible initiatives) by academic institutions in the context of securing reasonable conditions for global collaborations and circulations; and (iii) epistemological, which requires a complex discussion on how the perspective of precarious global mobilities affect the anthropological epistemic diversity. Beyond the old North-South divide, this roundtable aims to promote a global conversation on issues that are shared by both European and non-European colleagues, but in various ways. In other words, we are interested in situating precarity within a broader rumination about neoliberalisation of knowledge production and its effects over peoples' lives. We also intend to think together about possible initiatives, both from the viewpoint of social movements and institutions.

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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