The mobility delusion

By Joern Fischer

Funding for researcher mobility programs, international conferences, pan-European research consortia, and trans-continental analyses: Our research lives have become global.

Globalisation has had much to offer to researchers – insights, colleagues and friends we could not have had otherwise, exposure to systems far beyond our own experience, and ways of working that are so different from we knew from our own institutions. There are certainly a lot of interesting things to be learnt from living in a global world.

But this blog post wouldn’t be called “the mobility delusion” if I was here to talk about how wonderful it is to roam freely across the globe. Quite the opposite. Both in my professional and personal lives, I’m increasingly finding that mobility has high costs, but these are rarely acknowledged.

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