Love and Ryanair: Academic Researchers’ mobility

For academic researchers, Europe comes with the job : their intra-European mobility increased in the last decades, and internationalization is the keyword for their careers. On the other side, intra-European mobility also bears difficulties : couples living apart, decrease of permanent positions and frequent relocations, problems in accessing local welfare systems and the nightmare of organizing a pension scheme. That is, Ryanair comes with the job, too. In this paper, we firstly discuss intra-European and academic mobility in a context of growing job uncertainty. Then, drawing on an original database of in depth interviews addressing female researchers who experienced intra-European mobility, we explore their life narratives and self-representations, their love relationships, and their concrete life arrangements. Finally we discuss the implications for the “brain drain/circulation” discourse and the literature on mobility.