Globetrotting Outsiders: Faculty Labour and the Global University

Drawing on the experience of moving from Germany to the United Kingdom and then to the United States, this chapter argues that the globalisation of the academic labour market has made life for scholars more precarious everywhere. Moving abroad is both a symptom and a driver of a ‘race to the bottom’ in faculty labour conditions. This chapter focuses on two contradictions that make the move abroad a fraught proposition: (1) the contradiction between an understanding of academic work as professional on the one hand and the ‘gigification’ of this work on the other (2) the uneasy relationship between the global ambitions of elite academic institutions, and the realities of national academic cultures that can often put foreign faculty in a bind. Moving abroad is also, and importantly, a promise of meritocracy and upward mobility for scholars. This chapter investigates how the forces at work in a world dominated by global universities-as-business simultaneously operate on these (neo)liberal assumptions while undermining their realisation in practice.