Drawing on semi-structured in-depth biographical interviews with 60 early career Chinese academic returnees, this paper examines the temporal challenges involved in the personal and professional lives of mobile scholars. The key premise is that academic migration process may create temporal resources and opportunities for scholars to pursue career progressions and upward social status, but can also generate temporal constraints in their everyday life, bringing disruptions and discontinuities into their life course timelines. This paper highlights the temporal consequences of academic migration in relation to two perspectives: everyday times and individual lifetimes. Particularly, it also investigates how some returnees exercise agency and employ temporal strategies to alleviate the temporal dissonance produced in and through their moving process. This paper aims to demonstrate whether and how individual scholars confront temporal struggles on a daily basis and reconfigure life course trajectories while negotiating uneven academic mobility regimes. In doing so, the paper develops a temporally sensitive theoretical approach and unpack the multiple kinds of temporalities of academic labour in a cross-border setting, thus further advancing two streams of literature—academic migration and time in migration. Furthermore, it has drawn attention to the growing trend of temporariness and precariousness occurring in modern academia, especially in the context of migration. By examining the temporal tensions academic migrants encounter, this paper answers the call to reconsider the overly romantic engagements with academic mobilities and contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the mobility experiences of the highly skilled.
This article contributes to the literature on migration aspirations by examining their temporal dimensions and capacity to shape and be reshaped through migration. Drawing on qualitative research with Chinese migrants in New Zealand, we unpack the shifting character of aspirations to migrate in relation to three dimensions: everyday times; individual lifetimes; and institutional times. Utilising this temporally sensitive theoretical approach, the article shows that migration aspirations do not occur at one time – before migration – or across one duration – but rather articulate with multiple temporalities ranging from the intensity or slowness of everyday life, through appropriate progression through life courses, to the broader vistas of institutional and geo-historical time. Migration aspirations are hence necessarily temporally distributed rather than located in a singular chronological instance, or only in relation to a linear arrangement of past–present–future, and as a result, we argue for greater attention on the generation and reconfiguration of aspirations across time.
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