“Aliens” in the United States: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Foreign-Born Faculty

Abstract

We draw from our lived experiences as foreign workers in the U.S. academy to explore how foreign academic worker identity is constituted in the contemporary United States. We practice intersectionality by considering how our experiences of “foreignness” in the academy are intertwined with other markers of difference, including race, gender, sexuality, national origin, and age. We also draw from tenets of collaborative autoethnography, producing insight on three constitutive features of foreign worker identity through four narratives that draw from different genres in the autoethnographic tradition. The article highlights the value of collaborative autoethnography as a method of inquiry and reflection in organizational studies, provides a rare account of the ways in which intersectionality is negotiated in everyday life by foreign-born academics, and identifies features of the performance of foreign worker identity related to spatiality, presence, and absence.

Identity work by a non-white immigrant business scholar: Autoethnographic vignettes of covering and accenting

“…We are delighted to report that others are also conducting studies similar to our own. For example, Cruz et al (2018: 1) offer their own collaborative autoethnographic stories about intersectionality through an examination of how their ‘experiences of “foreignness” in the academy are intertwined with other markers of difference, including race, gender, sexuality, national origin, and age’. Autoethnography is, as we have illustrated, a method well-suited to investigating these micro-social processes because it enables us, as scholars, to both explore and analyse our own experiences.…”

“…I cannot tell at this stage the extent to which the life-narrative vignettes I provide in this article resonate with the stories similar others might tell. Nevertheless, I believe that the identity work I have retrospectively disclosed is highly likely to be symptomatic of conditions in which ‘double-lives are led in the postcolonial world, with its journeys of migration and its dwellings of the diasporic’ (Bhabha, 2004: 306), especially by other transnational academics (Cruz et al, 2018; Kim, 2010). An interesting question to pose concerns how multiple-identified immigrants outside higher educational settings reconcile their sense of being split between two worlds.…”

“…Emigrating from a country in the Global South to the Global North was a turning point in one of our lives which we feel strongly lends itself to this form of autoethnography. Indeed, the emphasis on the personal and evocative, along with autoethnography’s often literary and storied nature seems to us to open up new opportunities for novel contributions to be made in the area of intersectional identity work (Cruz et al, 2018). This is because, for us, covering and accenting are not primarily intellectual phenomena, but deeply personal ones, very much at the overlap of an individual’s biography and history, albeit experienced within a wider cultural and political context.…”

Pushing Beyond Positionalities and Through “Failures” in Qualitative Organizational Communication: Experiences and Lessons on Identities in Ethnographic Praxis

“…The tensions between essentialism and fluidity reflect the need for different forms of writing to deconstruct the masculine, White Western hegemony of academic form (Behar, 1997). Conversations and forums, such as Cruz, McDonald, Broadfoot, Chuang, and Ganesh (2018), are one powerful means to disrupt norms of rationality, reason, proclaimed success, linear flow, and tightly closed arguments and conclusions. We encourage organizational ethnographers to explore writing techniques that may help rethink the politics of subjective relations in fieldwork in decolonial and antiracist ways.…”

Reflections on Feminist Organizational Communication

“…Organizational communication scholars critique whiteness, Western-centrism, heteronormativity, feminisms, and other considerations (e.g., Cruz, 2015; Cruz & Sodeke, 2020) from dilemmic, tensional, and paradoxical approaches to materialities and discourses (e.g., D’Enbeau, 2017; Harris, 2015; Putnam & Ashcraft, 2017) to transnational feminist advocacy online (e.g., D’Enbeau, 2011; Linabary, 2017). Scholarship appears as diverse representations of experiences (e.g., poetry, code-switching passages, autoethnographies, performances, photovoice; Cruz et al, 2020; Dar, 2019; Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020). We have seen: newcomer socialization from a Black feminist standpoint perspective (Allen, 2000); frames for analyses of gender, discourse, and organizing (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004); the glass ceiling as socially constructed (Buzzanell, 1995); bounded materialities (Gist-Mackey & Guy, 2019); and intergenerational calling from Latinx voices (Sánchez Sánchez, 2019).…”