Academics on the move? Gender, race and place in transnational academic mobility

Abstract

BackgroundThis article contributes to the literature on gender and academic mobility by contrasting how postcolonial knowledge relations are played out in Swedish, Mozambican and South African academic workplaces. More specifically, it explores the experiences of gendered and racialised inequality in everyday academic working life in the three countries.Sample and MethodThe respondents are Mozambican scholars who have participated in a Swedish development-aid-supported PhD training programme in which mobility is mandatory. Using an online survey and interviews, their experiences of gendered and racialised inequality are theorised through the lenses of postcolonial knowledge theory and feminist translocational intersectionality.ResultsThe results point out the importance of highlighting the complex ways in which bodies and spaces are mutually produced and how these change in different postcolonial translocal academic settings and create differing conditions for academic work. In this context, the concept of ‘embodied discursive geographies’ is suggested as a way forward.