Academic mobility within europe : evidence on the mobility of italian academics to Lisbon and London

Programa de Doutoramento em Migrações. Tese de doutoramento, Geografia (Geografia Humana), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Psicologia, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Instituto de Educação e Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Território, 2018This thesis offers an innovative contribution to academic mobility as an emerging field of study. More specifically, it proposes a comparative analysis between two different academic mobility patterns in Europe: the mobility of Italian academics to Lisbon and London, as examples of long-term displacements from and to the European south and from the south to the north of Europe. Despite Brexit – Britain’s vote to leave the European Union – and its uncertain effects, the United Kingdom is a traditional example of ‘core country’, attracting academics, and not only, from all over the world. Portugal, instead, is a European ‘semi-periphery country’ whose scientific system ‘is marked by a semi-peripheral condition’ (Delicado 2013: 125). Main dynamics and features of the two mobility patterns are explored and compared, ultimately offering meaningful insights into the several ways in which intra-EU academic mobility can be conceived and experienced. In an increasingly connected world, research activity is becoming more internationally oriented and collaborations among universities a widespread practice. Although the prominence of academic mobility within both national and European debate, however, there is still a limited understanding on how academic mobility is constituted as an object of inquiry – mostly conceived as a positive force (Robertson 2010) contributing to excellence (European Commission 2014a). As appealing as this idea is, it is important to address the less positive sides of the phenomenon. This means, inter alia, recognising that different patterns of intra-EU academic mobility exist and produce diverse effects on the people and the places involved. A mixed method approach is adopted in this study. More specifically, the empirical part of the research project is structured on the following tracks: (i) the review of two rich secondary datasets supplied by DGEEC (Lisbon) and HESA (London); (ii) 136 exploratory e-surveys disseminated among Italian academics in Lisbon and London, (iii) a world café hosted at IGOT, in Lisbon and six face-to-face and Skype interviews with Italian academics based in London