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

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.