Immigrant Academics and Cultural Challenges in a Global Environment

This edited volume brings together the voices of different academics to illuminate the role of culture in determining the character and quality of the social and professional lives of mobile academics. The book examines specific issues on cultural diversity and the management of the heterogeneous classroom and diverse teaching/learning contexts. Teaching, learning, and research are processes carried out in situated contexts and within constructed, inherited, and negotiated cultural milieu, contexts that invariably affect the performance of the immigrant academics in their new homes and host academic institutions. The chapters in this volume provide analyses, reflections, and synthesis of intercultural and cross-cultural experiences. They include how migrant and expatriate scholars or students negotiate their cultural identities in new environments, how they engage with issues of differences in language accents, and how they navigate issues of minority versus majority status. They 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 the new and diverse classroom situations, and how native academics and the larger members of the receiving societies encompass the new challenges and opportunities of their now diverse society in a framework that they can understand. As the educational landscape goes increasingly global by the minute, studies such as these that deliver much insight on how migrant, immigrant, and expatriate academics, in their interaction with their hosts and with other immigrants, negotiate and resolve various psychosocial and socioeconomic challenges and dissonances, provide valuable and much-needed perspectives. This unique book provides an important discourse on the mobility across the boundaries of cultures and their primary subject of examination--to which the concepts of culture, change, and mobility are applied--is the mobile or sojourning academic (as students, teachers, and researchers). This is an important book for those in cross-cultural studies and education.