Project Details
Projekt
Translating strangeness into strengths – International mobility in postdoc careers
Subject Area
Sociological Theory
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 447967785
This project aims to empirically reconstruct competition-related forms and functions of internationality in postdoc careers. Drawing on insights of the sociology of valuation and a relational understanding of internationality, we hypothesize that postdocs and their activities are not “international” per se. Rather, to become a stake in competition, internationality must be asserted and validated. This is especially complex in the context of multiple competition. The analytical design of the study is twofold and focuses on how internationality is constructed and accomplished in postdoc careers: first, we will investigate how capital that postdocs have accumulated is translated between national contexts. Second, we want to understand how experiences of international mobility are valorized in postdoctoral career trajectories. The project approaches the corresponding processes and practices through a triangulation of ethnographic and interview-based longitudinal data: the planned ethnography captures practices of interpersonal negotiation, evaluation and attribution, while the qualitative interview panel (started in the first funding phase) is continued to analyze strategies of intrapersonal mobility and competitive positioning from a processual perspective. Both analytical approaches facilitate disciplinary comparisons. The project promises to make key contributions to the study of internationality in academic careers and to the understanding of the dual nature of internationality as a competitive advantage and as a result of competitive practices in science.
DFG Programme
Research Units
