Séminaire ReSIC 2025-26 - Valériane MISTIAEN

Tuesday 2 December 2025, Valériane Mistiaen will present her research project (that will be submitted to FNRS) during a ReSIC Seminar. 

Her intervention will focus on Academic mobility, that has become a defining feature of research careers. Understanding how it operatesis crucial, as it shapes how scholars work, move, and are evaluated in increasingly internationalisedand precarious academic environments. While migration studies have examined irregular or low skilled migration, the mobility of highly qualified researchers, especially postdoctoral scholars in the SSH, remains underexplored. Existing studies focus on motivations, challenges or brain drain, butrarely on the symbolic and ideological functions of mobility. This project investigates how academic mobility, presented as an opportunity rather than as migration, has become a normative criterion of academic excellence. It hypothesises that mobility functions as symbolic capital –a marker of prestige– and as precarious labour within the neoliberalisation of academia. 

The project pursues four interrelated objectives: 1) trace how mobility became embedded in EU's academic discourse ofexcellence; 2) analyse how postdoc applicants construct mobility in funding proposals; 3) examine how evaluators use mobility as a criterion; 4) investigate how postdocs narrate lived mobility. Combining Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, and qualitative interviews on a multilingual corpus (French, English, Dutch & Spanish), this research offers an unprecedented comparative view of academic mobility across Europe and develops a theoretical model of hypermobility as an ideological construct.
 

Valériane Mistiaen is a FWO junior postdoctoral researcher at VUB-Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She holds a PhD in Information and Communication (ULB-Université libre de Bruxelles) and in Communication and Media Studies (VUB). Her PhD research combines (Critical) Discourse Analysis with Corpus Linguistics to study how denominations used to name people on the move in Belgian French- and Dutch-language media shape the public issue of migration differently in both linguistic communities of Belgium. Her current research focusses on how grammatical morphology carries ideology in state-induced return discourse related to migration. This research is conducted in French, Dutch, Spanish, and English. 
 

She recently published an open-access book on the denomination of people on the move in Belgian French - and Dutch - language media (Did You Say “Migrant”? Media Representations of People on the Move, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, April 2025).
 

The seminar will be held in room DB2.332 and online.