DrSamantha Gallivan

My PhD uses the idea of 'stickiness' (Ahmed, 2004) to conceptualise mobility in scientific work. What attracts scientists to a particular institution or location, and why do they sometimes feel stuck there? What scientific practices adhere and become embodied by a scientist so that they carry these with them through their careers? How do sticky ties to friends, family and country shape difficult decisions about academic mobility for an individual? In what ways can scientific ideas themselves become sufficiently sticky to sustain the interest of scientists across borders and scientific cultures? My research uses Problem Centred Interviews with globally mobile Postdoctoral scientists to develop longitudinal narratives of their 'lives scientific' and to allow horizontal analysis across these narratives to construct common themes concerning (im)mobility. Alongside these narratives, I am developing a critical discourse analysis of the United Kingdom's Global Talent Visa, with the aim of showing how the dominant discourses around this visa help constitute the affective bordering practices of global science work in a Post-Brexit UK. In building a picture of contemporary 'sticky' science, I hope to understand how the experiences of mobility of individual Postdoctoral scientists affects their decisions on whether to move from or stay in London, at a time of fragmentation and emerging multipolarity in the global order. 

I am interested in globalisation, internationalisation, academic (im)mobiliies and neocolonialism in Higher Education, and in particular how these forces affect the future of Medical Education and shape the workforce required to meet the global need for medical care. 

I am site co-lead in an international research collaboration between ICSM, Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Southern Univesity of Denmark (SDU) using multimodal analysis of student-made images to explore professional cultures of medicine and identuty formation between Germany, Denmark and the UK.