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Temporality and academic mobility: Shomoyscapes and time work in the narratives of Bangladeshi faculty

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Abstract

Academic mobility has been predominantly investigated as a resource for career development and progression of individuals or as a contributor to national economic growth and advancement (brain-drain/gain). Yet, despite its significance, the temporal dimensions of academic immobility/mobility remain undertheorized in academic mobility studies. By temporal, I am going beyond clock-time to include any phenomenon tied to making meaning and related to time-related changes. Drawing on Shahjahan et al.’s (2022) notion of shomoyscapes, this paper focuses on Bangladeshi faculty’s experiences as an example of how a temporal lens can help illuminate the interrelationships between academic immobility/mobility and temporality to enliven scholarly understandings of such a migration process. It showcases three Bangladeshi scholars’ narratives to highlight different temporal rationales, constraints, and agencies of migration among aspiring, returnee, and/or immigrant mobile scholars’ experiences, which are often studied separately in academic mobility studies. It argues that a temporal lens showcases how mobility begins and continues temporally in people’s lives before and/or after spatial movements (i.e., physical movements from one space to another). Such time work was interconnected with relational entanglements, constituting complex temporal landscapes (i.e., shomoyscapes) encompassing future, present, and past. It concludes with implications of a temporal lens for future academic mobility studies.

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Notes

  1. “Temporal” is used as an adjective throughout this paper to signify any phenomena related to “time,” such as (a) modern “clock time” (dominant concept), or *b) phenomena “relevant to time,” such as schedules/calendar, tempo, durations, continuity, sequence, trajectory, priority, discipline, resources, or eras (past, future, present), or (c) anything “as a result” of phenomena related to time (e.g., experiences, entanglement, rationales/logic, force, engagement, constraints/challenges/tensions, agency, practices, value, or temporal categories (e.g., sleep, body, or work times)), and/or (d) an epistemic tool that helps make meaning of all the above (e.g., lens, analysis, accounting, perspectives, or maps).

  2. Given the temporal lens of this article, the notion of a singular “home” country is complicated and may not apply to all Bangladeshi academics given the fluidity of movement and situatedness of lives in different spatial, social, and temporal contexts.

  3. By relational or relationality, I refer to a way of knowing and being encompassing feelings and relationships between bodies (i.e., between an individual and one’s family, a group (i.e., students), or a nation-state), and is always social in nature.

  4. By geopolitics of knowledge, I am referring to knowledge/power relations tied to colonial processes structuring the existing hierarchical global HE system that privileges certain knowledge systems derivative of world regions (e.g., Anglo-Euro American contexts) as metropolitan centers of knowledge and learning while allocating others to the periphery (Alatas, 2006; Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2011; Shahjahan, 2016; Shahjahan & Morgan, 2016); Furthermore, due to these knowledge/power relations, scholars/students in metropolitan regions need not worry about the social or global mobility of their learning, research, or credentials that their peripheral counterparts constantly face given the lack of material resources and symbolic capital (Fahey & Kenway, 2010; Schöpf, 2020).

  5. An ethical review process was conducted at the author’s home institutions before data collection/analysis. Our research team was composed of one academic of Bangladeshi origin, and one undergraduate and graduate student from Dhaka University, Bangladesh. Interviews were transcribed, and those interviews that were mostly conducted in Bengali, were translated to English during the transcription process. The participant names used in this article are pseudonyms.

  6. Data analysis for this paper was confined to my research objective: to understand the temporal dimensions underlying academic mobility. This inquiry stemmed from the fact many mentioned the importance of academic mobility throughout the interviews as part of one’s past/future career trajectory. Data was first openly coded with emerging themes about academic mobility and then deductively coded with the conceptual framework in mind during the writing process. I used “writing as a method of inquiry” to analyze the coded data (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005)—a mode of inquiry that centers the very act of writing up data (here narratives) as an analytical tool to make sense of data. I allowed the writing process to constitute the theorizing of data by (a) exploring various ways to thematize, reduce, and (re)present the narratives by exchanging drafts for reviewer feedback and, based on feedback, (b) honing my theorizing of the narratives by refining my conceptual framework using the writing process.

  7. Unlike Ratul or Nahida, Nabaneeta’s example highlights how one’s mobility shomoyscape may revolve less around academic work per se and more with one’s personal circumstances shaping one’s academic career trajectory. Nabaneeta’s narrative highlights how academic mobility is not simply about crossing borders physically solely for academic reasons but also encompasses personal reasons. Nabaneeta’s example helps accentuate the immigrant life experience, the various borders one is forced to cross (e.g., linguistic, cultural, and religious) as a result, and, given Nabaneeta’s physical mobility took place a ‘while back’ unlike Ratul or Nahida, the analysis helps foreground how the past is more salient in one’s mobility shomoyscape.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following colleagues for their valuable comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript: Adam Grimm, Rino Adhikary, Nisharggo Niloy, Naseeb Bhangal, Salah Hassan, and the two anonymous journal reviewers.

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We received Koo Endowment funding for conducting this study.

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  1. Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University, 428 Erickson Hall, 620 Farm Lane Road, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Riyad A. Shahjahan

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Shahjahan, R.A. Temporality and academic mobility: Shomoyscapes and time work in the narratives of Bangladeshi faculty. High Educ 86, 1195–1211 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00968-9

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