Academic statelessness: at-risk academics in the UK navigating the transition to post-fellowship positions

This study advances understanding of forced academic displacement through interviews with 11 at-risk academics and 4 support network members navigating UK Higher Education. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory and Beaney’s four-zone framework, we reveal how institutional practices fail to recognize displaced scholars’ cultural, social, economic, and symbolic capital. The analysis introduces the concept of academic statelessness, a liminal condition between fields, and begins to explore an emerging concept of displacement capital as a form of collective resistance to individualized precarity, which we identify as a promising area for further research. Our findings demonstrate how at-risk academics experience profound internal contradictions when positioned as temporary humanitarian subjects rather than potential colleagues. Support structures reproduce marginalization through visa restrictions, temporal limitations, and exclusion from professional development opportunities. The study reveals how forced displacement creates distinctive educational exclusions beyond traditional stratification. These findings challenge inclusion frameworks that position diversity as additive rather than transformative, demonstrating how educational fields require structural transformation to recognize displaced scholars’ trajectories as producing legitimate academic contributions.