ABSTRACT
This paper is a meta-analysis of qualitative studies on international scholars migrating to academic peripheries. In contrast to studies focused on relocating to the US and other global centers, or those focused on ‘star faculty,’ these studies reveal a different face of international migration. By examining 19 studies from all over the world, we identified eleven common themes centered around: institutional motivations to hire international faculty, individual motivations to seek employment in the peripheries, the specificity of migration and recruitment processes as well as various integration problems associated with choosing a career in less popular destinations. This analysis offers an overview of in-depth national cases, which is interesting for cross-cultural researchers and students of particular peripheral systems. We demonstrate that foreign-born scholars in the peripheries are very often motivated by factors that would be negligible in the analysis of academic migration to centers and face different challenges.
ABSTRACT
Based on a qualitative study of school-to-university transition focused on working-class first-generation university students, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, it illustrates the multiple intertwining dimensions of the process of moving from school to university within an ‘open-door’ admission policy context such as the Italian one. Second, it emphasizes the role of students’ social networks and secondary school institutional habitus in differentiating how working-class students experience university decision-making. Using a Bourdieusian framework, this paper show that family habitus and cultural capital influence the decision to transition to university. However, the paper also shows that these influences are mediated by schools’ institutions according to their positions within the Italian tracking structure. In this respect, it is argued that institutional habitus constitutes a relevant heuristic to provide deeper understanding of barriers encountered by working-class students to access to university and to acknowledge the existence of important dimensions of differentiation among these students.