Time in migration: temporariness, precarity and temporal labour amongst Chinese scholars returning from the Global North to South

While facing labour precarity of the increasingly competitive academia-industry, mobile academics encounter another set of challenges brought by the global shift away from permanent migration towards more temporary forms of migration since the 2000s. Yet, the occurrence and impact of 'temporariness' in academic migration, especially at the personal and individual level, are not well understood. Drawing on qualitative research with 40 early career Chinese academic returnees, this paper extends the literature on academic migration by examining how it intersects with the temporal dimensions of mobile scholars' lives. The paper focuses on the state of 'being temporary' Chinese academic returnees experience both before and after their return. Particularly, it investigates how some returnees conduct temporal labour to mitigate the temporal precarity generated across their mobility process. It aims to bring the temporal and emotional dimension of migration to the fore, and demonstrate how institutional temporal discourses (e.g. migration regimes and policy) intimately affect individual migrant lives and subjectivities, including their life course trajectories, labour market opportunities and everyday forms of social belonging. In doing so, this paper develops a temporally-sensitive theoretical approach to further understand the impacts of mobilities, thus contributing to addressing the overwhelming spatial emphasis of migration studies.