Learning to Know Elsewhere: Migrant Academic Labour and the Situated Geographies of Knowledge Legitimacy

This paper uses the author’s academic migration across the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Sweden to examine how knowledge legitimacy operates in practice within higher education. Challenging the prevailing assumption that academic expertise and credentials are universally portable, the study reveals how legitimacy is spatially stratified and continually negotiated. To conceptualise these dynamics, the paper introduces “epistemic settlements,” the historically sedimented configurations of disciplinary norms, linguistic expectations, and evaluative criteria that stabilise legitimacy within specific higher education systems. Additionally, it develops the concept of “recalibration” to capture the hidden intellectual, affective, and institutional labour required by migrant academics to remain recognisable across these uneven systems. By combining Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology with analytical autoethnography, the paper contributes to the geographies of knowledge, demonstrating that place is not merely a backdrop but an active force in determining whose knowledge counts, where, and on what terms.