Migrant scholars, researchers, and graduate students from illiberal and autocratic regimes operate within a landscape of barriers and dilemmas unique to their condition. Caught between the global surge in authoritarianism and the democratic backsliding in consolidated democracies, migrant scholars seeking to advance critical research must grapple simultaneously with repression at home and anti-migrant sentiment in host countries.
Their condition remains often overlooked in debates on migration and democratic backsliding, yet it embodies- in more painful ways than that of citizen scholars- the transformations of knowledge politics in response to the global assault on critical disciplines fueled by democratic backsliding.
The panel welcomes in particular contributions exploring, but not limited to, the following themes:
1. How international mobility regimes and visa politics shape migrant scholars’ careers and aggravate their vulnerability as workers, including by narrowing the range of available career opportunities and study areas in host countries, and shaping migration projects.
2. The toll on mental health, research work, personal finances, and social/family life produced by the additional time- and energy-consuming labor required to navigate host countries’ administrative and workplace cultures.
3. The invisibility of migrant scholars as non-citizens, unable to access representation mechanisms influencing public policy in host countries, while unable to participate in the political life of their home countries, and their strategies to resist or transform such vulnerability, particularly through alternative forms of participation.
4. The marginalisation of migrant scholars’ work on their home countries, including the epistemological dilemmas related to gaps in paradigms and legibility, and the effects of epistemological exceptionalism defining scientific generalisability through proximity with “the West”, shaping research directions and the allocation of resources consequently.
5. Migrant scholars researching autocracies: how support from universities (or lack thereof), mobility regimes, and insider/outsider dilemmas shape fieldwork in home countries.
6. How migrant scholars navigate the overlapping risks of transnational repression and the growing threat of retaliatory measures (particularly in the form of deportation or employment termination) in host countries where democratic backsliding is driving backlash against scholarship critical of state practices.