The hunger artist and academic migration: On political depression and relational poverty

Abstract This autoethnography presents fragments of an invisible life, an ordinary body navigating the terrain of ‘academic migration’ (2009–2025), from rejection as a PhD applicant to recognition as a high‐achieving graduate. Provoked by my recent pursuit of Fulbright Postdoctoral Award in the United States, I draw on Kafka's figure of the hunger artist to conceptualise migration—both physical and intellectual—as a political epistemology. Through creative–relational inquiry, this performance autoethnography explores the existential themes of political depression and relational poverty. The hunger artist's subversive narrative is analysed for its embodied and psychological resonance, advancing the development of ‘livingness’ as a conceptual framework. This psychopoetic intervention engages the everyday body and enacts political therapy, refiguring relational poverty as spaces of creative living. This article demonstrates how the poetics of writing migration can open a breathing space—a way of becoming—for those rendered invisible within dominant academic and social structures.