A temporal gaze towards academic migration: Everyday times, lifetimes and temporal strategies amongst early career Chinese academic returnees

Abstract

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.

“Unattended” retirement: Lifestyle migration and precarity of the Houniao

“…Yet, as shown by the case of the Houniao in this research, privilege and precarity simultaneously run through the process of lifestyle migration (see also Benson & O'Reilly, 2016; Botterill, 2017). Critically, we argue that lifestyle migrants or other seemingly highly skilled mobile subjects in general may be perceived as a more elite form of precariats (see also Wang, 2019a, 2019b; Wang & Collins, 2020). The search for a good life through (lifestyle) migration is not a straightforward process but demands constant agentive navigations through a set of expected and unexpected risks, uncertainties, and precarities.…”

Temporally Distributed Aspirations: New Chinese Migrants to New Zealand and the Figuring of Migration Futures

“…In this regard, our article makes the following important contributions. First, it contributes to addressing the overwhelmingly spatial emphasis of migration studies whereby the temporal narratives have been rendered either a static category or neglected as a subject of debate (Griffiths et al, 2013; Wang, 2019a, 2019b). Our claim is that migration is an uneven and temporally contingent process in which mobility trajectories are multidirectional and constantly reconfigured (Robertson, 2014b).…”

“…As such, migration aspirations relate to public temporal norms about appropriate life course progression and the appropriate timing of migration (Collins and Shubin, 2015). Yet, the temporalities of migration are also marked with uncertainty and hindered by changing circumstances and shifting abilities, meaning that migrants are prompted to continuously re-imagine futures and adjust mobility trajectories (Wang, 2019a, 2019b). We emphasise the importance of addressing these disruptions in expected lifetimes as key functions of the emergence and articulation of aspirations towards present and onward migrations.…”

“…In this article we bring these emergent discussions of aspiration into conversation with parallel but largely separate debates around the significance of time in migration. Over the last decade scholars have argued that migration is as much concerned with time as it is space, and there has been a sustained effort to theorise and empirically investigate temporal dimensions in migration studies (Griffiths et al, 2013;Robertson, 2014aRobertson, , 2014bWang, 2019aWang, , 2019b). An early intervention came from Cwerner (2001) who pioneered an eight-fold temporal framework for migration studies.…”

“…As Erel and Ryan (2019) have demonstrated, there is a synchronicity between individual biography, family/career timelines, migration trajectories and wider socio-spatial political contexts in historical time. Therefore, decisions both on how one spends their time and major life choices are not always an individual prerogative but depend on structures beyond migrants' control (Wang, 2019a(Wang, , 2019b.…”