Travelling in time, between places, and jobs: exploring temporal dimensions of academics’ international trajectories

Based on the assumption that mobility has both spatial and temporal
dimensions, the aim of this paper is to bring forth the often-neglected
temporal dimensions of international academic mobility. We explore
how time and temporality plays a role in the decisions and lived lives of
international academics by analysing their experiences and mobility
trajectories. We do so by drawing on qualitative interviews with 21
international academics differing in age, nationality, and career level
employed at three Danish universities. The analysis shows that for many
of our participants, mobility had little to do with internationalisation of
higher education rationales. Rather their mobility rationales were
embedded in personal needs and wants, often related to securing
permanence for the less privileged and related to experiences and
adventure for the privileged. By unfolding the stories about which
decisions, coincidence, and sacrifices are part of academic mobile life,
we show how citizenship-based hierarchies lead to spatial and temporal
inequalities. The paper concludes that for the international academics,
places are positioned not only geographically but also temporally in
hierarchical ways and that the individual mobility trajectories are
differently entangled in a global-temporal orientation.