Intersectionality, emotionality and transnationality: migrant academics in UK higher education

Abstract

While these injustices around race and gender are experienced across many academic communities, migration status produces a specific and undertheorised layer of vulnerability, shaped by anti- immigration policies, visa-inflected precarity, and shrinking academic freedoms that existing frameworks have not adequately theorised. This editorial introduces a special issue (SI) that brings together six papers examining the overlapping forms of marginalisation experienced by migrant and minoritised academics in UK higher education (HE), at the intersection of race, gender, and migration status. It develops three interconnected analytical lenses – intersectionality, emotionality, and transnationality – as a framework for understanding experiences that no single concept can fully capture. Intersectionality is extended through translocational positionality to account for the fluid, multi-sited identities of migrant-scholars; emotionality foregrounds affective experiences such as exhaustion, loneliness, and invisible labour as structurally produced rather than incidental; and transnationality attends to the cross-border dimensions of migrant academic life, including transnational care burdens and geopolitical surveillance. Methodologically, this SI foregrounds biographical and autoethnographic approaches, arguing that these methods enable deeper engagement with lived experience and challenge dominant notions of objectivity in knowledge production. Addressing three interconnected gaps in the existing literature – the relative neglect of migrant-academics, the undertheorisation of racialisation and migration as a compounded intersection, and the absence of transnational care and visa-related precarity from accounts of academic labour. The editorial calls for a fundamental rethinking of HE structures and EDI frameworks, advocating change that moves beyond symbolic inclusion to address the material, affective, and epistemic conditions shaping migrant academics’ lives.