ABSTRACT
Movement represents a defining feature of academic life in the 21st century. This chapter examines academic migration both as a demographic trend manifest in statistics on staff mobility, and as a social imaginary persuading actors that the successful scholar is she who moves. The chapter begins with an overview of contemporary academic migration, using European and Danish data to establish general trends. This leads to a discussion of mobility as habitus, which suggests that most academics accept travel as natural to a scientific career, not least in contexts that are traditionally non-English speaking. A final section challenges the myth of the cosmopolitan scholar. The author introduces the notion of grounding, which is used to describe the process of organisational socialisation that transforms the international recruit from a ‘stranger’, unfamiliar with institutional norms and culture, to the localised migrant who has acquired the practical knowledge necessary to perform teaching in a manner recognisable to local staff and students. Grounding is presented as the situation confronted by most academics required to teach in a foreign environment, which prompts the author to dismiss the idea of scholarly cosmopolitanism as imaginary rather than real.
