Delayed academic consolidation and active aging in European academia: a collaborative autoethnography of migrant women

Abstract

Introduction: Migrant women's opportunities for active aging, understood through the World Health Organization framework of health, participation, and security, are shaped by cumulative inequalities across the life course. In European higher education, migrant women academics often experience delayed academic consolidation through trajectories marked by precarious employment, disrupted institutional and relational ties, constrained recognition, and normative expectations that privilege linear and uninterrupted careers. This article examines how and why migrant women academics experience delayed academic consolidation and explores its implications for active aging. Methods: Grounded in collaborative autoethnography and informed by feminist intersectional perspectives, the study draws on first-person narratives and collective dialogic interpretation. Results: The analysis identifies four cross-cutting experiential dimensions: uprootedness and relational fragility; imposture; health and wellbeing; and modes of enacting the profession. These dimensions reveal how misrecognition, precarity, temporal dislocation, and work intensification shape academic life over time. The findings show that delayed academic consolidation is not only a career-related phenomenon, but also a life-course process with consequences for future health, participation, and security. Discussion: By bringing feminist intersectional perspectives, recognition theory, and the Active Aging framework into dialogue, the article conceptualizes delayed academic consolidation as a prolonged, non-linear, and structurally conditioned process through which academic recognition, participation, and stability are deferred as a result of intersecting inequalities. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the value of collaborative autoethnography for making visible embodied and situated forms of academic inequality that are often obscured in dominant accounts of academic work.