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For reasons ranging from the global crisis and the shrinking job market to the disillusion with the establishment of academia but also including wanderlust, identity, worldviews, research, and not least the proactive hiring of mushrooming universities around the world, an increasing number of academics at different career-stages spend time at institutions located in socially disadvantaged environments, politically unstable areas, regimes of dictatorship, segregated contexts, and war zones. For some this means returning home, for others it means moving far away from the place/s that they call home.  As a result, while there is an increasing level of confrontation with issues and challenges that until recently have been typical of fieldwork settings, universities are also becoming the crossroad of multi-layered interests. Academia on the Frontline aims to explore these dynamics, and understand the strategies and the solutions worked out by academics with experience in the above-mentioned settings. Proposed but not exclusive foci are: originality and authorship; participatory research, authority, and representation; government and non-government funded research; advocacy; outsourced and outsourcing research; (cultural) mediation; gender, class, ethnicity, belonging, sexuality and power at the workplace; teaching, learning, and curricula adaptation. Multidisciplinary approaches from academics in all domains are solicited. Authors may use a variety of methods non exclusively including qualitative, quantitative, historical, ethnographic, financial, economic, and management analysis. Abstracts between 500 and 1000 words plus a short bio should be sent to Livia Holden at livia.holden@lums.edu.pk or liviaholden@insightsproduction.net. Feedback and advice are most welcome too. ‘A/REF’ publisher is envisioned.