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

They include discussions on how migrant or expatriate scholars or students negotiate their cultural identities in new environments, how they engage with issues of differences in language, and how they navigate issues of minority versus majority status. The chapters look at how immigrant scholars modulate their natal cultures in their new homes, how they work and rework their pedagogical beliefs and practices to suit new and diverse classroom situations, and how native academics and the members of the receiving societies encompass the new challenges and opportunities of their now-diverse society in a framework that all involved parties can understand. In summary, this book discusses how migrant, immigrant, and expatriate academics—in their interactions with their hosts and with other immigrants—negotiate and resolve various psychosocial and socioeconomic challenges and dissonances that derive from their attempts to negotiate between two or more cultural contexts as a result of the imperatives of diversity and cultural heterogeneity in their host universities and colleges. Thus, the primary idea and analytic tool that bind the chapters of this book together is culture. All of the chapters deal with mobility across the boundaries of cultures, and these chapters’ primary subject of examination, to which the concepts of culture, change, and mobility are applied, is the mobile or sojourning academic (i.e., immigrant students, teachers, and researchers).

At a general level, the chapters constituting this book agree in their conception of culture. Their various analyses agree that culture is made up of set patterns of behavior that humans have learned, which give them and their natal societies stability and continuance, and which are passed from one generation to another. This chapter agrees with that conception and with a similar one given by Smelser: “[Culture is a] system of patterned values, meanings, and beliefs that give cognitive structure to the world, provide a basis for coordinating and controlling human interactions, and constitute the link as the system is transmitted from one generation to the next” (1992, p. 11). Since what, where, and how these behavioral patterns are learned vary temporally and spatially, people from different places have different cultures. Culture, thus, derives from, answers to, and, in turn, reacts to specific ecological and social contexts. The social