Always an Academic Immigrant

A Collective Memoir

By Dafna Lemish

Rutgers University Press

Immigrant employees play an essential role in every industry, including academia, but the unique experiences of immigrant professors have received little study. Given that academia has its own distinctive cultural norms, do immigrant academics experience the same kinds of challenges endured by other immigrants?

Always an Academic Immigrant is a collective memoir that gives voice to eighty-one academics who immigrated from thirty-seven countries for a career in an institution of higher education, either in the United States or one of ten other countries. Through in-depth interviews and observations from her own experiences as an immigrant scholar, Dafna Lemish shares the highs and the lows that academic immigrants feel as they search for both a country and an institution they can call home. She discovers the formative events that led these scholars to pursue careers outside their native lands and details the challenges they faced adapting to unspoken expectations in their new countries and workplaces. Ultimately, this book reveals the strategies that immigrant professors use to bridge their native and adoptive cultures while highlighting the vital contributions they have made to academia as scholars, teachers, and leaders.

This pioneer journey by Dafna Lemish—half research, half reflexive memoir—highlights private struggles and invaluable contributions of migrant academics to American, European, Australian, and other 'Western' universities as professors and researchers. Outsiders socialized in non-Western contexts, academic immigrants introduce alternative agendas and new insights on old issues. Unable to fully assimilate, they often challenge and 'shake' the established paradigms and mindsets among their colleagues and students alike. This is an equally exciting read for academics in the fields of immigration and higher education and broad audiences interested in intellectual diversity and intercultural dialogue. Larissa Remennick, author of Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict

This book is a tour de force on migrant scholars, a critical and understudied topic. Lemish deftly weaves personal narratives from an impressive set of interviews with perceptive observations and arguments. It powerfully shows why 'the personal is intellectual and political' and reveals its impact on personal lives and scholarship. A must-read for anyone interested in academic globalization. Silvio Waisbord, professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University

DAFNA LEMISH is a distinguished professor of journalism and media studies and interim dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University—New Brunswick in New Jersey. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Children and Media and her many books include Children and Media: A Global Perspective and Screening Gender on Children’s Television.

1     The Journey: Why this book
2     The Seeds: Do childhood experiences prepare for immigration?
3     The Voyage: What are the reasons for immigration?
4     The Challenges: Why is immigration so difficult?
5     The Benefits: What are these academics uniquely contributing?
6     The Home: Where is home for academic immigrants?
7     The Bridge: What keeps immigrants connected?
8     The Return: Would they consider going back?
9     The Support: What can be done to help academic immigrants?
Notes
Index

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