Temporality and Academic Mobility: Shomoyscapes and Time Work in the Narratives of Bangladeshi Faculty

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.