Chinese Scholars in American Academe: Negotiating Transnational Academic Identities

• In Event: Professional and Personal Identities of Faculty and Graduate Students

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is through in-depth interview to explore how Chinese overseas scholars recount their experience of teaching and research in American academe. More specifically, this paper seeks to understand how they create their own space in the U.S. higher education base within the globalizing times. Guided by postcolonial theories and cultural studies, the author argues that the mobile academics are agents of change whose presence and scholarship are changing not just the conditions for their lives but the definition of higher education itself. This paper concludes by considering the implications of local agency on global connectivity and emergence of new subjectivities in the transnational social field.

Author

• Qiongqiong Chen, University at Buffalo - SUNY