News
New article by DEAR Centre alumnus – “Displaced academics’ mobility and translocational positionalities: ‘academic poverty’, ‘academic death’, and ‘academic re-existence’ ”
Dr Ahmad Akkad Link opens in a new windowis a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Education and a Research Fellow and College Advisor at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford. He completed his PhD in Education at the University of Warwick. His doctoral research employed a longitudinal qualitative design to explore the lived experiences of displaced Syrian academics, theorising their contributions to higher education reconstruction and the recovery–development nexus in conflict-affected contexts.
This new paper written by Dr Akkad is based on his PhD thesis work and looks at the displacement of academics in the larger topic of academic mobility. Existing research has tended to homogenise displaced academics’ experiences through deficit-focused narratives that emphasise loss and marginalisation. This paper expands academic mobility frameworks to account for displacement as a dynamic, non-linear process, offering a more comprehensive perspective beyond exilic narratives that may underemphasise the complex interplay of structural constraints and agency.
Read the article at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-025-01440-0Link opens in a new window