Higher education has many variants, and the situation of academic staff varies considerably across and within countries.

This article uses a context of increasing institutional demand to be geographically mobile to examine how early-career researchers move across borders. I explore the case of Swiss academia, a particularly competitive and attractive environment with the highest levels of inbound and outbound mobility in Europe. In line with the aims of the European Research Area, an EU programme created in 2000 to foster a pan-European academic labour market, Switzerland funds scientific mobility and promotes extended research trips abroad as tools to boost collaboration and research excellence. Therefore, Swiss institutions have valued mobility for professional and personal development. In the meantime, they have raised concerns about female academics not being mobile and the potential consequences of their local family ties on career inequalities. In this study, I explore how early-career researchers experience mobility and how their personal accounts challenge institutional definitions of being mobile or immobile. I draw on a qualitative analysis of 65 semi-structured interviews conducted for two EU research projects on early-career academics from various backgrounds. I show how empirical data question the traditional—and often gendered—mobile/immobile dichotomy. I also highlight how mobility practices are normalised by the interviewees. Moreover, using the concept of stickiness, I describe a subtle range of sticky-to-stretchy mobility experiences influenced by both structural and individual factors. Finally, through the figure of the geoccasional worker, I question romanticised visions of mobility and stress the need to reconsider mobility as a (gendered) precarity issue rather than as a female problem.

Irrespective of national and disciplinary specicities (Le Feuvre et al 2018), the conditions of entry to an academic career are generally recognized as being increasingly selective in the contemporary context. In the competition for a reduced number of stable or permanent academic positions, recently qualied PhD graduates who want to pursue an academic career face two main challenges. On the one hand, they have to accept a succession of xed-term, often part-time and badly paid, precarious positions (generically designated as ?postdocs ?), that have become a prerequisite for selection to more stable and permanent positions in the global academic labour market. On the second hand, access to these positions usually requires some form of geographical ? usually transnational ? mobility, which removes them from their existing social networks. In this chapter, we propose to analyse the eects of the combination of precarious employment positions and geographical displacement on the gendered citizenship experiences of postdocs working in a specic academic context. On the basis of qualitative (biographical interview) and quantitative (on-line web survey) data collected in the course of the GARCIA project (www.garciaproject.eu), we will examine the citizenship challenges faced by postdocs from across the globe who are working in the Swiss academic context.

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