In recent decades, European higher education has undergone rapid internationalization, marked by increasing mobility of students and academic staff across national borders. Iceland reflects this broader European trend. At the University of Iceland, the country’s largest public university, international students and staff constitute a growing proportion of the academic community, including at doctoral and early-career levels. Women represent the majority of students and a substantial share of academic staff, while a significant number of doctoral graduates and researchers hold foreign citizenship. These demographic shifts position Icelandic academia within wider European debates on internationalization, equality, and academic labor. 

While internationalization is often framed as a marker of excellence and diversity, research across Europe shows that it also reshapes power relations within universities, particularly for those whose employment, residence status, and career progression are structurally precarious. Foreign women in academia frequently occupy short-term, grant-dependent, or informally defined positions, where gender intersects with nationality, language, and migration status. Within highly hierarchical academic environments, these conditions can increase vulnerability to discrimination, harassment, and other forms of violence, while simultaneously limiting access to institutional protection and redress. 

This paper examines the experiences of foreign women working in Icelandic academia, with a focus on employment-based violence (EBV). EBV is understood as psychological, sexual, economic, and symbolic harm occurring within the context of academic employment. The central research question guiding the study is: 

To what extent can the violence experienced by foreign women in Icelandic academia be understood as personal (direct) violence, structural violence, or as a product of their interaction? 

By addressing this question, the study responds to gaps in European and international research that have tended to focus narrowly on sexual harassment, often treating violence as an individual or behavioral problem rather than as an institutional and structural phenomenon shaped by employment precarity and migration status. 

The theoretical framework draws primarily on Johan Galtung’s distinction between structural and personal violence, complemented by Sara Ahmed’s analysis of institutional complaint. Structural violence refers to harm embedded in social and institutional arrangements that produce unequal life chances without a clearly identifiable perpetrator. As Galtung (1969) argues, such violence is “built into the structure” and manifests through unequal power relations and normalized disadvantages. In contrast, personal or direct violence involves identifiable actors and observable acts of harm, such as harassment, intimidation, or abuse of authority. 

While analytically distinct, these forms of violence are deeply interconnected. In academic institutions, personal acts of violence are often enabled, normalized, or rendered invisible through structural conditions such as informal power networks, opaque decision-making, ineffective reporting mechanisms, and institutional silence. Structural violence thus creates the conditions under which personal violence can occur repeatedly and with impunity. 

Ahmed’s Complaint! (2021) extends this framework by illuminating how institutional responses to reported harm function as mechanisms of structural violence. Ahmed conceptualizes complaint not merely as an individual act but as a process that exposes how institutions work to protect themselves. Complaints are frequently delayed, dismissed, or reframed as personal problems, while complainants—particularly those in precarious or foreign positions—are positioned as disruptive or risky. In this way, institutional procedures meant to ensure equality may operate as non-performative commitments that reproduce harm rather than resolve it. 

By combining these perspectives, the paper conceptualizes employment-based violence in academia as a phenomenon produced at the intersection of individual actions and institutional structures. Drawing on narrative and longitudinal qualitative data, including follow-up interviews, the study foregrounds how foreign women retrospectively interpret their experiences and how violence continues to shape their professional trajectories, mobility decisions, and sense of belonging. In doing so, the paper contributes to European and international scholarship by framing EBV as a structural issue within internationalized higher education and by centering the voices of foreign women, a group that remains underrepresented in both research and policy discussions. 

This study employs a qualitative research design grounded in narrative inquiry and informed by a longitudinal perspective to examine how foreign women working in Icelandic academia experience and interpret employment-based violence (EBV) over time. Narrative inquiry is particularly suited to this research as it foregrounds lived experience as it is narrated and situated within specific social and institutional contexts (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Riessman, 2008). Rather than treating violence as a discrete or static event, this approach captures how meaning is produced and renegotiated as participants’ professional and personal circumstances evolve. A longitudinal component was incorporated through follow-up interviews conducted approximately two years after the initial data collection. This design allows attention to both continuity and change in participants’ interpretations of EBV, including how earlier experiences are reassessed in light of institutional responses, career trajectories, or accumulated insight (Saldaña, 2003; Neale, 2019). Combining narrative inquiry with a longitudinal approach makes it possible to examine not only what participants experienced, but how their understanding of violence shifted over time. Narratives are treated as socially produced forms of meaning-making rather than neutral recountings of events. Participants’ stories are shaped by gendered and racialized organizational cultures, academic hierarchies, and norms governing legitimacy and belonging within universities (Acker, 1990; Chase, 2011). Narrative inquiry enables an exploration of how foreign women articulate silence, endurance, justification, and resistance within academic environments where violence is often normalized or minimized. This approach aligns with feminist qualitative traditions that emphasize voice, situated knowledge, and reflexivity (Harding, 2004; Charmaz, 2014). The study draws on two waves of semi-structured interviews. The first documented experiences of EBV as they were lived and understood at the time. The second involved follow-up interviews with five participants from the original group, focusing on how they currently interpret those experiences and their ongoing effects. These retrospective narratives are treated as analytically meaningful, with shifts and contradictions understood as reflective of changing social locations and institutional positioning (Neale, 2019). Data analysis followed a narrative analytical approach attentive to narrative structure, tone, and temporal framing (Riessman, 2008), situating participants’ accounts within broader theories of structural violence (Galtung, 1969; Farmer, 2004), gendered organizations (Acker, 1990), and institutional complaint processes (Ahmed, 2021). The researcher’s positionality as a foreign academic woman informed both access to the field and the interpretive process, requiring sustained reflexivity regarding proximity, power, and ethical responsibility.

The findings show that EBV against foreign women manifests primarily as psychological, economic, and symbolic violence, including harassment, exclusion from professional networks, employment insecurity, and abuse of authority. While some incidents involved identifiable perpetrators, these acts were consistently enabled by structural conditions such as precarious contracts, dependence on supervisors for funding or residence status, language barriers, and limited access to institutional support. Participants reported insufficient information about their rights and described complaint mechanisms as ineffective, delayed, or dismissive, even when formal reports were submitted. Follow-up interviews revealed shifts in how participants understood their experiences over time. Many women initially framed incidents as individual conflicts but later recognized them as structurally embedded patterns sustained by academic hierarchies and institutional cultures. Violence was frequently normalized or minimized, while those who complained risked reputational damage or professional marginalization, contributing to silence and withdrawal rather than resolution. The analysis demonstrates that personal and structural violence are mutually reinforcing. Institutional structures create the conditions in which individual acts of violence occur, and their repeated, unaddressed manifestation transforms them into structural harm. Although policies and procedures exist, they do not guarantee protection when implementation is obstructed by informal power networks and institutional inertia. Addressing EBV therefore requires confronting the structural foundations of violence and the actors who sustain them, rather than relying solely on formal regulations that fail to challenge entrenched power relations within academia.

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