Immigrant Academics and Cultural Challenges in a Global Environme ...

tool or an ordinary cultural artifact. It is, rather, “a place—one in which one can be ‘local’ in Jamaica, Finland, or the Philippines.”

Internet technology plays a mitigating role in intercultural relationships among those it brings together because traditional cultural markers and differences have little room to operate in getting work done over the Internet. Interestingly, such work is done rather peacefully and smoothly by people who are of different cultures and who live in different parts of the world. Gelfer’s chapter speaks to the possibilities that technology offers in addressing some of the cultural problems that physical mobility and immigration entail and offers mobile academics and individuals from universities and colleges the hope of a supplementary tool that can help alleviate some culturally induced difficulties in social interaction.

The chapters in this book investigate the formation and negotiation of the identities of immigrant scholars as these immigrants move away from home and settle in new ones. While the immigrants operate as academics, their ethnicity, foreignness, and accents mark them as different. Hence, as teachers, students, researchers, or scholars in general, they retain “foreign” cultural elements and adopt or combine elements that are new into their practices. They thereby negotiate and navigate sociopsychological, cognitive, and physical conditions that separate or distinguish them from their host community but that, at the same time, inevitably move them toward engaging with and adapting into it. Immigrant scholars, especially those who are cultural minorities, operate between cultures and embrace mixed aspects of the old and the new in tension as they form a new composition for their accented identities. A better appreciation of the dynamics of their situation and how their problems can be resolved will be of great service to them, as well as their employers.