Caring at a Distance: Digital Anchors and the Relational Work of Academic Mobility

Olga Cara and Ieva Puzo
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Olga Cara: Institute of Education, University College London, UK / Faculty of Social Sciences, Riga Stradins University, Latvia
Ieva Puzo: Faculty of Social Sciences, Riga Stradins University, Latvia

Social Inclusion, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: This article examines how Latvian early‐career researchers in the United Kingdom navigate academic mobility by cultivating relational moorings through digitally mediated practices in their professional and personal lives. We introduce the concept of digital anchors—socio‐technical infrastructures that sustain affective stability and continuity, and afford care under conditions of ongoing movement and precarity. Digital anchors are not reducible to individual platforms, devices, media choices, or communicative practices. Rather, they function as relational infrastructures across spatial separation by stabilising rhythms of interaction. Using life history interviews with ten early‐career researchers, we analyse how digital anchors enable the orchestration of transnational care, support, and collaboration, while also revealing the techno‐emotional gaps. We provide an in‐depth engagement with biographical narratives that illuminate processes that remain largely invisible in large‐scale mobility statistics and macro‐level datasets. The findings show how professional trajectories and personal lives intertwine, as digital anchors structure how work, care, and relationships are sustained across distance. Although digital communication provides everyday presence and coordination across borders, embodied co‐presence remains crucial for renewing relational depth, trust, and professional rapport. Moments of crisis, life course transitions, and ageing relatives further expose the fragility of digitally sustained ties. We argue that digital anchors function not as substitutes for proximity but as dynamic relational infrastructures that make academic mobility liveable, while simultaneously generating new forms of relational work, ambivalence, and vulnerability within transnational academic careers. Importantly, the digital anchors are maintained through ongoing techno‐emotional labour. The contribution of the article is in advancing the concept of digital anchors as a way of understanding how stability is enacted under conditions of academic precarity and mobility.

Keywords: academic mobility; digital anchors; early‐career researchers; Latvia; precarity; transnational care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v14:y:2026:a:12226

DOI: 10.17645/si.12226

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