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Institute
History without borders
(2020)
“Why,” Francisca Isidro wonders, “did we have to leave our families and move so far away, only to come back as cooks, waitresses, sales assistants, and the like?” And she recalls: “We came back from our time in East Germany with professions that were not held in particu-larly high regard in Mozambique. Nobody understood why we didn’t return as engineers, doctors and teachers. ‘A waitress?,’ they would wonder. ‘Why, they could have become a waitress in Mozambique. Nobody needs to spend so many years in school for that.’”2And with that, Ms. Isidro puts her fi nger right on a misapprehension at the heart of an ambitious state-led education migration program that saw 900 Mozambican children attend the School of Friendship (Schule der Freundschaft , SdF) in Staßfurt in the district of Magdeburg, in what today is Saxony-Anhalt, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) from 1982 to 1988.3 Ms. Isidro returned to Mozambique as a trained salesperson for clothing, a profession she neither chose nor ever worked in again subsequently. Like her, these 900 children had to navigate the diverging values that particular environments bestowed upon knowledge. What they learned was interpreted diff erently in their home communities, at the SdF, and in their German host families
Introduction
(2021)
Paths Are Made by Walking
(2021)
While academic mobility has generally been positioned in the literature as a ready, at-will movement of people and ideas, this chapter demonstrates how the conditions of mobility and immobility “all at once” impact knowledge production and exchange. By offering a more nuanced window into the experiences of scholars in exile, this chapter challenges dominant discourses of academic mobility and draws on lessons learned from within liminal spaces of knowledge production to elicit more response within higher education communities. Context-rich examples reveal the interpersonal tensions and cultural shifts—including gender, ethnic and race-based stereotypes and discrimination—that affect intellectual outputs, further problematizing the conceptualization of knowledge production in human capital terms. Lessons gleaned from Scholars at Risk (SAR) and related programmes suggest support structures that amplify scholars’ agency; more broadly, higher education should consider ways of adapting to its diverse knowledge producers, rather than supporting the acclimation to its current environment.