Immigrant employees play an essential role in every industry, including academia, but the unique experiences of immigrant professors have received little study. Given that academia has its own distinctive cultural norms, do immigrant academics experience the same kinds of challenges endured by other immigrants?
Always an Academic Immigrant is a collective memoir that gives voice to eighty-one academics who immigrated from thirty-seven countries for a career in an institution of higher education, either in the United States or one of ten other countries. Through in-depth interviews and observations from her own experiences as an immigrant scholar, Dafna Lemish shares the highs and the lows that academic immigrants feel as they search for both a country and an institution they can call home. She discovers the formative events that led these scholars to pursue careers outside their native lands and details the challenges they faced adapting to unspoken expectations in their new countries and workplaces. Ultimately, this book reveals the strategies that immigrant professors use to bridge their native and adoptive cultures while highlighting the vital contributions they have made to academia as scholars, teachers, and leaders.
1 The Journey: Why this book
2 The Seeds: Do childhood experiences prepare for immigration?
3 The Voyage: What are the reasons for immigration?
4 The Challenges: Why is immigration so difficult?
5 The Benefits: What are these academics uniquely contributing?
6 The Home: Where is home for academic immigrants?
7 The Bridge: What keeps immigrants connected?
8 The Return: Would they consider going back?
9 The Support: What can be done to help academic immigrants?
Notes
Index
