Abstract
While there is increasing awareness of the contributing effect of the academic mobility imperative on gendered inequalities in the academic profession at large, there is a missing link in current research on this topic. Namely, while ‘care’ is often named as the explanatory factor for why women, and to an extent professionals of any gender at peak childrearing age, are less mobile, this article argues that care is insufficient as an explanatory factor for immobility. Care and other terms such as ‘family responsibilities’ and ‘domestic obligations’ come to serve as a shorthand or explanatory factor for gendered immobility, but these terms elide the complexity of the relationship between care and mobility. This article argues that, without a fuller understanding of how care and mobility intersect, inclusivity drives run the risk of misunderstanding or even reproducing the problem. The specific mobility addressed here is international conference travel as a form of short-term academic mobility which contributes to academic career success and the perpetuation of a mobile academic ideal. The article elaborates a novel conceptual construct, ‘sticky care’, which is applied to empirical data from a diary-interview study of the impact of caring responsibilities on academics’ conference participation. Two dominant mobility-related strategies are elaborated: ‘night/s away’ and ‘get back’. The overarching ambition of this article is at a conceptual level: to bring more complexity and nuance to the concept of care when it is mobilized as an explanatory factor for (gendered) immobility and indeed for inequalities in the academic profession at large.
Highlights
In an increasingly globalized higher education sector, academics are required to demonstrate evidence of international experience and collaboration as a ‘criterion of excellence’ for recruitment and promotion (Herschberg et al 2018)
This paper explores participants’ discussions of conference travel to unpack the notion that care causes immobility
Several participants discussed the notion of the time it would take to get back home if unforeseen events occurred, and actively chose conferences with this in mind. This strategy involved limiting the distance travelled in case they had to spontaneously return home. Some participants discussed this strategy in relation to examples of places they would rule out: P17 ruled out travelling to Australia from the UK; P15 noted that she was going to attend a conference in Sweden and had chosen this above a conference happening at the same time in California, USA, because it would be ‘easier to get home’ to the UK from Sweden; P16 stated that, if she had to choose between conferences of the same academic value in London and Mexico, she would choose London, based on London being less ‘far away’ from her country of residence
Summary
In an increasingly globalized higher education sector, academics are required to demonstrate evidence of international experience and collaboration as a ‘criterion of excellence’ for recruitment and promotion (Herschberg et al 2018). Some participants discussed this strategy in relation to examples of places they would rule out: P17 ruled out travelling to Australia from the UK; P15 noted that she was going to attend a conference in Sweden and had chosen this above a conference happening at the same time in California, USA, because it would be ‘easier to get home’ to the UK from Sweden; P16 stated that, if she had to choose between conferences of the same academic value in London and Mexico, she would choose London, based on London being less ‘far away’ from her country of residence This strategy limited academics’ mobility by drawing an invisible line on the map as to where they could travel that would enable them to ‘get back’, restricting the potential zone of networking that they could engage in. While it is easy to attribute these mobility restrictions to care as an explanatory factor, it is important to note that this care is not just any care—it is care in the form of daily-task specialism and a gendered ideal of physical presence
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