This paper reports on one component of a broader qualitative project on internationalisation in European higher education, focusing on how it is enacted through cooperation infrastructures and mobility-oriented programmes (Altbach & de Wit, 2018; de Wit, 2020). Rather than treating mobility as a neutral instrument of policy, we approach it as a lived and narrated practice through which academics interpret, justify, and sometimes defend internationalisation in everyday institutional life (Ackers, 2005; Kim, 2009). Methodologically, we use narrative analysis to examine how participants sequence events, assign responsibility, and evaluate what happens to them, paying attention to meaning-making and positioning in their accounts (Squire, Andrews & Tamboukou, 2014).

Internationalisation in European higher education can be understood as a heterogeneous assemblage of strategies and practices, strongly shaped by EU policy architectures that promote mobility, cooperation, and skills (Scott, 2015; Morley et al., 2018; Dillabough, 2021). These architectures circulate an imaginary of the flexible, adaptable academic subject and project benefits at institutional and system levels, while the literature also documents persistent ethical and organisational tensions in how internationalisation is pursued and governed (Robson & Wihlborg, 2016). Such tensions become sharper in politically contested environments where transnational cooperation and ‘global’ universities can be publicly framed as culturally suspect or socially divisive (Altbach & de Wit, 2018; van der Wende, 2020; Zembylas, 2025).

We treat Romania as a revealing site for examining this dynamic: internationalisation is institutionally promoted, yet public discourse can periodically problematise mobility and external ties, producing heightened sensitivity around critique and justification (Wodak & Fairclough, 2010, Dobbins, 2017; Kiss & Székely, 2021; Weimer & Barlete, 2020).  In this context, participants’ narratives show how mobility becomes morally charged, something to be explained, legitimised, or carefully managed, while also revealing the largely unrecognised work required to keep internationalisation “going” in practice. We conceptualise this work as invisible academic work: translation, mediation, informal mentoring, and affective and relational labour that sustains cooperation but is rarely institutionally legible (Haton, 2017; Gordon, Willink & Hunter, 2024). Research questions

How do internationally mobile academics narrate and make sense of internationalisation in politically contested environments?

How do their stories represent moments of tension, ambivalence, and moral pressure around mobility (e.g., justification, suspicion, legitimacy)?

What forms of invisible academic work emerge in these narratives as ways of coping, mediating, and keeping internationalisation workable, and how are these forms of work valued, normalised, or obscured?

This study adopts an interpretive narrative design (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012; Squire, Andrews & Tamboukou, 2014) to examine how internationalisation is experienced and made meaningful in everyday academic life. It draws on an ongoing ethnographic project on internationalisation in European higher education. This paper reports on the mobility-focused component, using internationally mobile academics’ accounts to show how the demands and contradictions of internationalisation are narrated, felt, and navigated in practice. Rather than treating “making internationalisation work” as an individual accomplishment, the analysis attends to how participants story the everyday labour through which mobility becomes workable under institutional expectations, policy demands, and politicised framings. These narratives make visible often unrecognised work, translation and mediation, informal mentoring, and emotional and relational labour, as practical and moral resources for coping with ambivalence and pressure. Participants are internationally mobile academics (Morley et al., 2018), defined as university staff working outside their country of origin and/or engaged in short- or long-term mobility schemes. Purposive, variation-seeking sampling covers diverse positions and degrees of institutional insertion (doctoral/postdoctoral, early career, tenured; varying contract security; teaching/research/administration roles) to capture heterogeneous trajectories. While the broader project includes other internationalisation actors, this paper focuses exclusively on mobile academics’ accounts. Data sources: 1. Semi-structured interviews with internationally mobile academics (approx. 25–30), conducted online in English or Romanian and audio-recorded with informed consent (January–April 2026). Prompts elicit concrete episodes and dilemmas where internationalisation is experienced as demanding, ethically complex, or politically sensitive (e.g., translation/mediation, emotional labour, informal mentoring, navigating contested framings). 2. Document analysis of EU, national, and institutional texts (e.g., Erasmus+ and MSCA guidelines, national strategies, university internationalisation strategies, mobility policies, public communications). Documents are treated as elements of the discursive environment that shapes the expectations and imaginaries participants invoke, contextualising the pressures referenced in their accounts. Transcripts are analysed through narrative interpretive procedures , focusing on meaning-making, positioning, and narrated forms of invisible work. Documents are read comparatively to trace policy framings that participants encounter, appropriate, resist, or repair in their stories (Prior, 2011). Given the political sensitivity of some accounts, the study prioritises informed consent, careful anonymisation, and secure data handling. Trustworthiness is supported through reflexive memoing and opportunities for participants to clarify factual details or respond to interpretive summaries where appropriate (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012).

Aligned with the paper’s aim, to examine how internationally mobile academics narrate and make sense of internationalisation in politically contested environments, and how invisible work emerges in these accounts, our expected contribution is primarily interpretive. Using narrative analysis, we show not simply what pressures exist, but how participants render internationalisation coherent, legitimate, and livable through stories of concrete episodes, dilemmas, and repairs. The analysis is expected to trace how dominant framings of internationalisation (e.g., mobility, excellence, cooperation, institutional development) circulate through EU-linked programme rationales and institutional discourse, and how these framings are taken up, reworked, or resisted in participants’ narratives. We examine how it appears as an interpretive resource and moral vocabulary in accounts of everyday academic life, shaping what participants present as expected of them (e.g., flexibility, linguistic competence, availability, “being easy to work with”). Second, the paper develops an initial narrative-grounded typology of “invisible work”, derived from recurring ways participants narrate episodes of trouble and repair, allocate responsibility, and position themselves and others when describing what it takes to “make things work.” In this sense, the typology can captures how invisible work becomes narratable and intelligible in accounts (e.g., translation/mediation, informal mentoring, emotional–relational labour, anticipatory adjustment, legitimacy work), rather than offering an external classification of duties. Our study contributes by showing how the lived experieces amd conditions of internationalisation are accessible not only through policy analysis or organisational indicators, but through the narrative accounts by which mobile academics interpret contested contexts and account for the often-unrecognised labour that sustains everyday internationalisation.

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