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

analyses. The prominent research methods applied are narrative inquiry, discourse analysis, and historical narrative. The geographical coverage of the chapters includes North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, though, experiences from North America predominate. Five chapters explore the teaching experiences of immigrant professors, while two chapters reflect on research experiences. International student experiences are inferred throughout the book, but one chapter—the second of two that deal with research—is written from the perspective of a senior doctoral student doing field research in a foreign country. It is the only one that directly explores the immigrant scholar’s experience in Africa. The other chapter on research relates experiences that span Southeast Asia and Europe. Unfortunately, neither South American nor Middle Eastern countries are represented directly in this book. Nonetheless, the chapters together provide very useful templates for assessing culture-influenced challenges with which immigrant scholars everywhere grapple. University administrators can distill from the chapters critical referents for designing more flexible and responsive immigrant-friendly policies for their foreign professors and international students. Additionally, immigrant scholars will find this volume to be an informative guide as to what to expect in the give and take of intercultural exchanges that must occur with their relocation to new communities.

Chapters 1 and 2 are introductory with chapter 1 by Femi James Kolapo providing an overview of the literature on a wide range of acculturation issues with which immigrant scholars—professors, researchers, and students—must grapple as they engage in their practice, and chapter 2, by Ann O’Hear, giving what is largely a theoretical exploration of three intercultural models that sojourners to the United States may find operative. Both chapters, and especially chapter 1, provide a more generalized foreground treatment of many of the challenges facing immigrant scholars to which subsequent chapters give more personal and specific treatments. Chapter 1 relates relevant themes and experiences discussed in the rest of the book to this literature on acculturation and cultural adaptation, as well as explores other relevant immigrant acculturation issues that other chapters in the book do not cover.