Mobility, immobility and precarity: The mobility imperative and its impact on precarious academics

This chapter examines the intersection of academic precarity and international (im)mobilities. It draws on a project that involved forty biographic interviews with individuals who had experienced long-term academic precarity. By this, we mean situations where qualified individuals tried and failed to secure a stable academic post for at least five years. Their stories are important: Research on the impact of international mobility on academic careers generally excludes those who are no longer employed in academia as well as those who were pushed to its margins – for example, staff on hourly paid contracts and/or those working in private colleges. As a result, little is known about those for whom mobility did not deliver its promise of career progress, and why that might be the case.

The focus of the project is Irish higher education, in continuity with our earlier work that revealed the extent and severity of academic precarity in Ireland (Courtois and O’Keefe, 2015) and its intersection with gendered inequality (O’Keefe and Courtois, 2019). Some of our participants were migrants, had experienced other higher education systems, and/or were not in Ireland at the time of the interview, but their trajectories were still shaped by Irish academia. While acknowledging the transnational dimension of some trajectories, the focus on one country ensures that the impact of deliberate political choices and national policies is not obscured or diluted in some abstract transnational space. Academic precarity is indeed shaped by political choices that impact lives directly (decreased funding for higher education, public sector recruitment freeze) and indirectly (unaddressed housing affordability crisis, legislation limiting union 52power) as well as by other structural factors such as pronounced gendered and racial discrimination in academia (Kempny and Michael, 2021; Meade et al., 2023) and a broader national labour market that distinctly disadvantages migrants (Laurence et al., 2023).

The chapter examines the effects of the ‘mobility imperative’ on precarious careers. While we have written more extensively on this topic elsewhere (Courtois and O’Keefe, 2024), here we draw on Foucault (1991) and focus on the role that this mobility imperative plays as a form of governmentality in the context of academic precarity in Ireland. This governmentality is different from that which polices immigration (Fassin, 2011) because it does not rely on observable, specific technologies such as formalized requirements, institutionalized mechanisms or defined criteria. It is largely discursive but nonetheless powerful, and acts as a self-disciplining mechanism, which may shape mobility decisions but more importantly, makes those who are not mobile, or not mobile in the right way (which is never clearly specified, but also never achievable), responsible for their precarious situations.