Higher education (HE) researchers have become increasingly interested in transnational academic mobility as a field of inquiry. A phenomenon frequently associated with ‘progress’ and ‘development’, research accounts are written about academic migrants who harness career momentum and experience upward social mobility resulting from their travels. In contrast to scholarly accounts which link mobility with progress of many kinds, this article foregrounds under-considered accounts of migrant academics who describe themselves as moving ‘backwards’ and feeling ‘stuck’. Drawing on an empirical study with 25 migrant academics employed in Thailand, we investigate ‘stuckness’ via two narratives of Global North academics. These narrative portraits reveal how migration may be prompted by career immobilities and that migrant academics in Thailand may perceive that they lack opportunities for career progression. We also examine how Thailand is configured as a ‘weird’ mobility destination, one that may struggle for recognition as a site for international academic career progress. The key contribution we make to critical academic mobilities scholarship is to weave in decolonial analyses of the geopolitics of knowledge production, examining ‘South’ and ‘stuckness’ as potentially linked categories for North-to-South academic migrants. We argue that narratives of stuckness among Northern academic migrants in Thailand are deeply interwoven with assumptions made about desirable directions of global travel, assumptions which are born from the profound inequalities which characterise global HE’s core/periphery structure.

高等教育（HE）研究人员对跨国学术流动性的研究越来越感兴趣。研究报告经常被写为关于学术移民的一种现象，这种移民现象经常与“进步”和“发展”有关，这些移民利用职业发展动力并因旅行而经历了向上的社会流动。与将流动性与多种进步联系在一起的学术报道相反，本文着重介绍了被认为自己“后退”并感到“卡住”的移民学者的未得到充分考虑的叙述。基于对泰国25名移民学者的实证研究，我们通过Global North学者的两种叙述来研究“卡顿”。这些叙事肖像揭示了移民可能是由于事业不稳而引发的，泰国的移民学者可能会认为他们缺乏职业发展的机会。我们还研究了泰国如何配置为“怪异”的流动目的地，这可能会为争取国际学术职业发展的地位而努力而获得认可。我们对关键学术流动性奖学金的主要贡献是，对知识生产的地缘政治进行了殖民主义分析，考察了“南”和“滞留”作为南北学术移民的潜在联系类别。我们认为，泰国北部的学术移民对死板的叙述与有关全球旅行的理想方向的假设紧密相关，