Focusing on Tanzanian and Mozambican PhD students funded by Swedish development aid, this article investigates how everyday academic work life is gendered in Sweden and in the students’ home academic departments. In particular, it focuses on the role of ‘important others’, such as international donors, universities, colleagues and family, in enhancing or alleviating vulnerability and how this shifts across spatial contexts. Integral to this is exploring how obstacles are managed and negotiated by PhD students, and how they articulate capability and therefore resist a position as a victim. The results indicate the glonacality of vulnerability as something that stretches over institutional and national boundaries, and how vulnerability can be (re)produced at local university level despite the good intentions of donors and universities operating at a global level. In addition, a translocational and intersectional perspective highlights how situations of vulnerability are gendered and radicalised differently in different academic contexts.