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International academic mobility and the temporality of contribution: a morphogenetic analysis of returnee scholars’ engagement in higher education
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DOI：10.1080/03075079.2026.2695258.png)
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Abstract
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While international academic mobility is recognised for personal development and career advancement, existing literature often treats returnee scholars’ contributions to their home institutions as an automatic outcome of mobility. Moving beyond this linear assumption, this paper argues that returnee contributions are not a simple transfer of knowledge but are temporally situated enactments of reflexive agency shaped by the structural and chronopolitical conditions of return contexts. Drawing on 62 semi-structured interviews with returnee scholars from 19 countries in the Near East (Middle East and North Africa) and Eurasian regions, and guided by Archer’s work on reflexivity and morphogenesis within Critical Realism and Transnationalism, the study examines how reflexive capacities cultivated through international mobility are mobilised and enacted upon return in contributing to higher education systems in home contexts. The analysis develops a typology of four contribution modes: past-oriented contributions aimed at redressing historical legacies (slow morphogenesis); present-oriented contributions focused on institutional survival amid crisis (compensatory morphostasis); future-oriented contributions aligned with strategic reform agendas (accelerated morphogenesis); and multi-temporal contributions spanning these modes (layered morphogenesis). Synthesised in an empirically derived conceptual framework, these findings show how different forms of contribution emerge under varying temporal and structural conditions. The paper contributes a temporal perspective to Archer’s morphogenetic approach, challenges linear ‘brain gain’ models, and offers a heuristic for understanding and supporting the context-specific contributions of returnee scholars.
Keywords:
Academic mobility
academic returnee
higher education
temporality of contribution
critical realism
transnationalism
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