Knowledge Alchemy and the Talent Imaginary: Emergence and Evolution

In this paper, I examine the knowledge alchemy involved in transforming academic mobility as a familiar act of academic travel to a commodified activity in today’s global competition for talent. In contemporary policymaking, the assumed practices of the Medieval Scholar often inform the common image of an Academic today. A visual that emerges is one of free flow of knowledge even though the actual practices of scholarly mobility—especially in medieval times—are hardly without incident. So why is this image so enduring and how does it affect our contemporary debates concerning the global competition for talent? I reveal that the two modalities one associates with knowledge alchemy are present in this transmutation process: first, the emergence of presuppositions concerning the connections between scientific mobility and innovation capacity, and, second, the embedding of these presuppositions into policy models (particularly in higher education policies and migration policies), as well as university recruitment practices. The interdependence of these two modalities of knowledge alchemy is so powerful that, I argue, these presuppositions persist in informing university, national, regional, and international policy actors about how to be “competitive” in the “global war for talent”.