Sociālantropoloģe Ieva Puzo uzstājas migrācijai veltītā konferencē Norvēģijā

Between knowledge and intimacy? Employment-related decision-making among international scholars in Japan and Latvia
Ieva Puzo

In this paper, I critically examine oft taken for granted rhetoric about academic mobility as a desirable move. I do so by zooming in on how mobility decisions are coproduced by researchers and people important to them. Based on semi-structured interviews with international scholars in Japan and Latvia as well as other ethnographic data, I highlight the ways in which researchers center personal relationships, intimacies and kin ties—including hopes for creating them—when making decisions about their potential employment locales. Through these narratives, I question assumptions about the centers of knowledge production in “the West” as the most desirable places for advancing careers and building lives.

While the “ideal” researcher is often portrayed as someone unencumbered by close personal ties and dedicating their life to science, the lived reality for many scholars, however, is quite different. They struggle to balance a multitude of professional and personal facets of their lives, especially as they grow older, create families of their own, and assume increasing care responsibilities. These struggles are exacerbated by research policies and employment structures that increasingly prioritize short-term employment contracts facilitating, in turn, the movements of research workers from one institution to another, both within one country and across borders. It is in this context that, through the perspectives discussed in this paper, I subtly destabilize the geographical hierarchies of global knowledge hubs and highlight how, when centering intimacies and other personal ties, more peripheral locales—or non-traditional migration destinations—may turn into desirable destinations for research workers.