International Faculty in U.S. Higher Education: Socialization, Learning, and Intersectionality as Conceptual Lenses

• In Event: Careers, Commitments, and Constraints: Faculty Lives Across Contexts

Proposal

In an increasingly globalized world, the demographic composition of faculty within U.S. higher education institutions is shifting, reflecting a growing presence of international scholars. National-level data show that nearly one-third (29%) of full-time faculty in science and engineering fields were born overseas, with the proportion rising to 38% at research-intensive universities (NSB, 2020). Foreign-born individuals also comprise 49% of U.S.-trained postdoctoral researchers (NSB, 2020). Although future projections remain uncertain, their presence is both substantial and consequential. Yet they have received limited scholarly attention in educational research.

While existing studies document demographic characteristics, employment patterns, and challenges such as isolation, visa precarity, and microaggressions (Foote et al., 2008; Chen & Lawless, 2018; Stojanović & Robinson, 2021), few examine how these faculty interpret and navigate the process of being socialized into U.S. academic life. For those early-career faculty especially, entry into U.S. academia entails more than starting a new job; it involves negotiating identity, legitimacy, and belonging within multiple overlapping contexts: a new country, a new national culture, an unfamiliar academic system, and distinct cultures of their employing institutions (Sorcinelli & Austin, 1992; Chen & Anderson, 2008). This paper responds to this gap by advancing a conceptual analysis of international faculty’s inner experiences, foregrounding interpretive and affective processes through which they perceive and make sense of values, norms, assumptions, and (re)construct academic identities across unfamiliar cultural and institutional terrains. Building on extant research on international faculty, I evaluate three conceptual frames in this paper—faculty socialization, learning theory, and intersectionality—selected for their demonstrated relevance in existing scholarship and their theoretical potential to shape future inquiry.

Classic models of faculty socialization conceptualize professional entry as a linear process of incorporation into institutional norms and disciplinary practices (Weidman et al., 2001; Van Maanen & Schein, 1979). This view, while foundational, presumes cultural homogeneity and positions faculty as passive learners of a stable institutional culture (Tierney, 1997). For international faculty, such models are insufficient: they obscure how multiple cultural trajectories, linguistic differences, and transnational histories inflect the socialization process. A critical perspective—drawing on symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969; Becker, 1961) and interpretive extensions of socialization (Tierney & Rhoads, 1993)—foregrounds meaning-making, negotiation, and resistance as central. International faculty interpret norms, recalibrate practices, and reshape selves in response to tacit expectations, ambiguous cues, and affective experiences (Cruz et al., 2020; Chuang, 2022). Such a reframing helps capture the subtle rhythms of academic life—quiet routines, informal mentoring, micro-level negotiations of belonging—that traditional models leave invisible. However, critical perspectives on socialization risk analytic narrowness if they remain focused on micro-level meaning-making without linking to broader structural conditions. Their greatest strength lies in illuminating how everyday encounters and tacit cues become sites where international faculty assemble legitimacy and belonging; their limitation lies in explaining how those encounters scale into patterns across contexts.

Alongside socialization, a second body of literature has approached faculty life through the lens of learning. Learning theories offer a complementary lens by conceptualizing faculty work as a continual process of reflection, dissonance, and identity reconfiguration (Dewey, 1916; Jarvis, 1987; Neumann, 2009). Moments of epistemic and cultural disjunctures—arising from unfamiliar norms—initiate cycles of reflection and adaptation beyond skill acquisition. Situated and transformative learning perspectives (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Mezirow, 1991; Dall’Alba, 2009) foreground how scholars gradually achieve legitimacy through participation, reflection, and reorientation of identity. This frame is powerful for analyzing inner experience: the affective labor of self-questioning, the ontological becoming of “who I must become,” and the recursive processes by which faculty recalibrate professional selves amid ambiguity. Yet its interpretive strength is also a limitation: by centering internal processes, learning theories tend to under-theorize how systemic inequities, racialization, and politicized immigration regimes inflect these moments of becoming (Bhopal & Chapman, 2019).

A growing stream of research on international faculty has drawn from intersectionality to foreground identity and power. This literature often focuses on how race, gender, and nationality intersect to shape faculty’s legitimacy, professional recognition, and classroom authority (Bhopal & Chapman, 2019; Chen & Lawless, 2018). Intersectionality contributes two particularly generative insights. First, structural intersectionality helps illuminate how institutional and policy regimes—immigration law, tenure evaluation, service expectations—disproportionately burden those positioned at multiple marginalized intersections (Hirshfield & Joseph, 2012). Second, representational intersectionality highlights the symbolic politics of visibility: how accents, surnames, or bodily readings shape assumptions of competence in ways that formal evaluation rarely acknowledges (Śliwa & Johansson, 2014). These analyses crystallize “foreignness” as a socially constructed, unevenly distributed status: some faculty’s difference is erased while others are hypervisibly marked as outsiders (Cruz et al., 2020). The limitation, however, lies in intersectionality’s tendency to reify categories and foreground harm. If treated in isolation, it risks pathologizing marginality and obscuring how international faculty tactically reappropriate difference as pedagogical resources or forms of capital (Chen, 2014). Its greatest value is thus in situating agency within structures of power, while remaining attentive to the interpretive work by which faculty navigate and re-signify their difference.

Together, these three frames offer distinct but overlapping insights. Critical perspectives on socialization capture the interpretive labor of becoming within tacit institutional cultures; learning theories illuminate the recursive, affective, and ontological processes through which faculty remake themselves; and intersectionality situates these processes within broader regimes of power and recognition. None alone is sufficient, but their interplay clarifies how international faculty are not simply adapting to fixed structures, but actively constructing legitimacy and professional selfhood amid ambiguous, unequal, and evolving academic terrains. By bringing these frameworks into dialogue, this paper contributes a conceptual reorientation: it foregrounds international faculty as agentic meaning-makers rather than marginal actors, and it highlights the layered interplay of cultural negotiation, reflective transformation, and structural positioning. Future research may build on this synthesis to generate empirically grounded accounts of how international faculty experience, interpret, and reshape academic life—tracing not only their adaptation to U.S. higher education, but also their incremental and often invisible role in transforming it.

Author

• Yingzhi Tong, Teachers College, Columbia University