1: Introduction

The most vulnerable part of today’s research workforce, early career researchers (ECR) will become our future research leaders. They must navigate research roles, projects and work environments turbulently disrupted by the world around them. Rapid technological advances, geopolitical and environmental uncertainty and shifting interest and investment in research and researchers make their pathways increasingly tenuous (Guyer, 2024; Pham, 2023; Withers, 2019). Researchers, employers and policymakers will find resources in the following chapters to better support this vital cohort to meet our future local and global challenges.

Reading the book, you will find ECRs’ stories of pursuing pathways, stories I collected as part of a narrative inquiry (Gasson, 2023). Researchers from Australia, Asia and the Americas who are now working around the world contributed to the study. My narrative inquiry analysis of their stories revealed tensions created by opposing expectations and opportunities. Exploration of these tensions in chapters of this book is grounded in the three narrative commonplaces – temporality (time), sociality and place (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006), as shown in Table 1.1.