ABSTRACT. This feminist autoethnography examines my year as a Filipino woman in a Gender Studies master’s programme in Budapest, Hungary, exploring the gap between the promise of the academic fairytale and the lived realities of international education. Drawing on personal notes and retrospective reflection, the article traces how studying abroad involved continuous adjustment within conditions of mobility, accelerated academic time and institutional evaluation. Framed through feminist ethics of care, the article examines how academic work is sustained through relational and embodied practices that often remain invisible in meritocratic narratives of individual achievement. By attending to the everyday conditions under which intellectual labour becomes possible, the article argues that academic success in international education is not solely an individual accomplishment, but a process enabled through often unrecognised forms of labour and care.

Keywords: feminist autoethnography; ethics of care; neoliberal higher education; meritocracy; international student mobility; quiet labour

How to cite: Domingo, R. (2026). Quiet labour and care in academic mobility: A feminist autoethnography. Knowledge Cultures, 14(2), 171–187. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc14220269

Received February 28, 2026 • Received in revised form June 6, 2026
Accepted July 15, 2026 • Available online August 1, 2026