Stories We Carry: Migration, Precarity, and the International University

The project consists of two open-access co-edited volumes, Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe (2023) and From the Margins: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity (2025), and asks what it means to build an academic career in a neoliberal, ‘meritocratic’, and international higher education environment as a migrant academic. 

Drawing on the two volumes, her own autobiographical chapter in the first volume, and her work on autobiography and autoethnography as methods, this lecture explores how migration and precarity intersect with other axes of marginalization, particularly gender and race. Through the collected narratives, the lecture exposes the hidden side of celebratory accounts of internationalization that leave out the heavy costs borne by migrant academics in their lives, bodies, and futures. It emphasizes the epistemological advantages of storytelling as a method from a feminist perspective. It also invites academics to think together critically and reflexively about questions of marginality, precarity, solidarity, and accountability.

Ladan Rahbari (PhD Mult.) is a political sociologist, writer, and associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, as well as a senior researcher at the International Migration Institute (IMI). She is a member of the Amsterdam Young Academy (2021–2026), co-director and board member of the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS), and a board member of the Amsterdam Centre for Migration Research (ACMR). Her research interests broadly include gender and migration politics, diaspora, and violence, with a focus on Iran and Western Europe and within decolonial, feminist, and critical theoretical frameworks. She is currently obsessed with the connections between femonationalism and authoritarianism. From September 2019 to September 2020, Rahbari served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies (DiGeSt). In 2025, she published her first novel, Exilium.