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

with the authority and responsibility to jointly make knowledge with her, but its price was the displacement of her own voice as a minority Other and as a female. The complex irony of the situation is that both categories, minority Other and female, are subjects that multicultural education, as well as feminist pedagogy, in this case, aim at empowering, including, and accepting. It is not surprising that Chatterjee questioned that aspect of critical pedagogy that disempowered her. A strict adherence by Chatterjee to the prescription of Freirean critical practice risked a scenario noted by Kubal, Meyler, Stone, and Mauney (2003, p. 442) “of providing a forum for reproducing those popular [stereotypical] images rather than for promoting critical thinking.”

Lee’s experience mirrors aspects of Chatterjee’s: a female, a minority, and an immigrant of another race teaching predominantly white students, this time, not multicultural literature of the minority Other, but rather Western political thought. Like most other minority female professors, she endured the questioning of her authority, authenticity, and capability as an effective teacher because she was a female immigrant of a minority group. But also, her specialization in Western political thought became as much a cultural-political issue over which her self-identity as an academic was fought and won. Raised in an ex-colonial nation and developing and maintaining a specific research interest that sought to demystify the West, which to her then was the Other, and finally, immigrating to Canada, Lee arrived as a student of Western political philosophy. At the university, she majored in her subject of interest and began to teach it as a professor. However, she debuted as a professional academic at a time when ideological developments in North American universities began to question and reject curricula and discourses, including Western political philosophies, that were considered to be ethnocentric, patriarchal, and marginalizing of knowledge from and about other cultures and peoples. This posed a double challenge of cultural and political nature to Lee. First, that part of her identity that originated from a postcolonial society and which had generated the interest in her to study Western political philosophy was called into question in the new community in which she worked. Second, there was a corollary implication that, as a minority in