This ongoing project explores the relationship between scholars’ mobility, research infrastructures, career paths, and knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities across the region. During the fellowship, it will focus on the Maghreb in particular. The main research question is how recently established programs and institutions offering postgraduate training and research grants are altering the conditions of doing research, the selection of research themes and languages, and career paths in the social sciences throughout the region.

While mobility has always been a key component of academic labour markets, and research training obtained abroad has become a well-established norm, it has largely contributed to a process of systemic extraversion. In recent years, attempts have emerged to rearticulate local research landscapes through the establishment of new research training institutions and reforms of existing ones, with the aim of transforming the infrastructures of knowledge production. This development has the dual goal of countering the brain-drain effects associated with such mobility and enabling other research subjects, more attuned to local realities and often published in Arabic, to enter the research agenda.

The project asks how the movement of scholars influences the kinds of knowledge they produce, and to what extent newer forms of research infrastructure, including training and support, are altering the conditions under which knowledge is produced in, on, and for the region.