Unpacking agency in combining academic mobility and the family: narratives of academic Bangladeshi married women

Academic mobility as a proliferating global phenomena and a gender terrain requires intense research attention. Moreover rather than viewing the mobile academics from a simplistic rational human capital models or the impact of macro-structural factors on their mobility experiences, they need to be studied in the context of other meso-level institution such as family. Nonetheless a gender and intersectional perspective can be more effective to understand the heterogeneity of mobility experiences. Within this contextualization, this research intends to explore how the academic Bangladeshi married women have negotiated their agency in combining their mobility aspiration and family. Under de Haas’s ‘aspirationcapability’ framework of migration and drawing on Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ and Anthias’ (2012) ‘translocational positionality’ as analytical lens the research data were collected through qualitative interviews (as a research tool of interpretive paradigm) with academic Bangladeshi married women. Through exploring and analysisng their narratives of mobility aspiration and capability in the context of family domain I have argued that agency for mobility is not only tied to individual rather it is ‘relational’ and ‘contextual to their ‘translocational positionality’. Their agency academic mobility and maintaining the familial relationships depend on their embeddedness and move across the field of academia and the family and in the interplay of gender, class and age dynamics. The main research findings demonstrate the presence of a combination of instrumental and intrinsic aspirations for academic mobility endeavour motivated by individual goal and family strategy. In the face of diversified constraints emanated from the intersection of gender and age, they have utilized the advantages of their class position as facilitating factors in shaping their mobility capability. Throughout the mobility trajectory in combining academic and family life they have resisted, conform and alter gendered expectation and role. The analysis of the research findings show they negotiated agency through intermingling the habitus of two different field namely academia and family. Through partially refuting and partially reproducing the dispositions of both field they utilized the advantages of their positionalities and to overcome the constraints if necessary they even conformed to the established norms to initiate, refine and transform the available opportunity structures. In conclusion I have argued that negotiation of agency in the arena of gendered mobility is never a straight forward generalization to view women as passive victim or complete challengers of structural constraints. Through suspending many aspects of their gender habitus they paved way to bring some structural changes and in this process a different kind of habitus may emerge in the intersection of two social fields that can motivate both continuity and change. Thus evaluating the agency from an inter-filed andrather than intrafield context can be more productive to explore the changing dimensions in gendered experiences of mobility.