When Bureaucracy Meets Transnational Lives

One Form, One Life

This morning I went to a government office in Poland carrying a thick stack of documents—paper traces of a professional life that has unfolded across countries, institutions, and decades. My goal was simple, if somewhat ironic: to apply for a pension. Not because I am ready to retire, but because doing so has become a bureaucratic prerequisite for something else entirely—securing a no-cost extension on a research grant so that my doctoral students have the time they need to complete their publication-based dissertations.

In other words, I was there not to exit academia, but to continue participating in it.

What I expected was paperwork. What I encountered instead was a quiet but telling collision between two ways of understanding a life.

The Fiction of a Single Address

“Please provide your address,” the clerk said.

I gave her my Polish address, adding that it would only be valid until the end of May, when I return to Washington, DC, where I have lived and worked for over forty years. This clarification did not help. The form required one address—singular, stable, and preferably permanent. The idea that someone might, in practice, live and work in more than one country did not quite fit.

We moved on.

Gaps—or Global Careers?

Then came my employment record in Poland. The clerk studied it carefully and pointed out what she saw as significant “gaps.” And indeed, there are gaps—if one looks only within the confines of the Polish system. I have lived abroad since 1984, returning occasionally to Poland for research, collaboration, and teaching. What appears as absence in one national record is, in reality, part of a continuous international academic career.

None of this was her fault. She was patient, professional, and doing exactly what the system required of her. But the system itself rests on assumptions that are increasingly out of step with how many people—especially academics—actually live and work.

Internationalization Meets Administration

For decades, migration scholars have analyzed transnationalism: lives lived across borders, sustained ties to multiple places, forms of belonging that are not easily contained within a single nation-state. In academia, this is not an exception—it is often the expectation. Careers span countries. Institutions emphasize internationalization. Doctoral students are encouraged to be mobile, to collaborate globally, to publish across borders.

And yet, the administrative frameworks that structure these careers remain stubbornly national.

The result is a peculiar kind of distortion. A transnational life—coherent and continuous when lived—appears fragmented when translated into bureaucratic categories. Multiple affiliations become inconsistencies. Mobility becomes instability. Entire decades of work risk being recast as “gaps.”

A Technicality with Consequences

What struck me most in this encounter was not the inconvenience, but the misfit between lived reality and institutional logic. The system was not designed to fail; it was designed for a different kind of life.

In my case, this misalignment has tangible consequences. A rigid administrative requirement—employment or pension status—now determines whether I can secure additional time for my doctoral students to finish their dissertations. What looks like a technicality is, in practice, a structural constraint shaping academic trajectories.

Who Are Our Institutions Designed For?

It is easy to treat such encounters as mildly amusing bureaucratic anecdotes. And there is, admittedly, something faintly absurd about trying to compress a transnational life into a single line on a form.

But the implications are more serious. As long as institutions continue to operate with assumptions of singular belonging and linear, nationally bounded careers, they will struggle to accommodate the very forms of mobility and internationalization they otherwise promote.

Perhaps what needs updating is not just the paperwork, but the underlying imagination of what a life—and a career—can look like.

Until then, many of us will remain engaged in a kind of ongoing translation exercise: explaining, repeatedly, that a life can be lived in more than one place at once.

And perhaps, just perhaps, what our institutions need is not another form, but a short course in transnationalism.