“I have an accent, so people know I’m not from here”: a racial and ethnic analysis of international STEM faculty in Hawai‘i

Abstract

Immigration policies in the Global North often prioritize migrants based on professional qualifications, leading to a reliance on the labour of "highlyskilled migrants" (HSM), especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Yet, the workplace experiences of HSM have been understudied, including in higher education. Based on 50 interviews with STEM faculty in Hawai'i, we identified that HSM faculty held distinct ways of negotiating employment circumstances that were categorically different than Hawai'i or U.S.-born faculty. While some HSM expressed feelings of inclusion in their multi-ethnic workplace, others shared stories of bias and discrimination. To untangle this divergence, we conceptualize the professional workplace in Hawai'i as one shaped by histories of occupation and migration. Using "ethnic embodiment" (Retsikas) and Hill-Collins' "outsider within", our analysis contributes to scholarship on the career pathways of HSM, as we consider how histories of place can influence perceptions of ethnic and racial belongingness.

Places and mechanisms of belonging and exclusion: Intra‐EU academic migration in a comparative perspective

“…If doctoral migrants want to be acknowledged in the academic sphere of France, their French must have a certain finesse and complexity, so that it can be used as a form of distinction (Jisa, 2004). Unlike language barriers for entering the host countries' educational system or labour market that were widely investigated in migration studies (Kosyakova et al, 2022; Resnyansky, 2016), we demonstrate language as a tool of social distinction towards newcomers within the academic field (see also Rita & Karides, 2022). Since an excellent command of French was a precondition for entering the HES, our interviewees had favourable preconditions in everyday life outside the academic sphere.…”

“…| 7 of 11 studies (Kosyakova et al, 2022;Resnyansky, 2016), we demonstrate language as a tool of social distinction towards newcomers within the academic field (see also Rita & Karides, 2022). Since an excellent command of French was a precondition for entering the HES, our interviewees had favourable preconditions in everyday life outside the academic sphere.…”

“…While language is already known as a tool of exclusion in domestic HES (Bourdieu, 1992), we could demonstrate that it is also effective against nonnative speakers. As has been discussed elsewhere, language as a tool of distinction for academic migrants can imply the construction of ethnic and racial boundaries (Rita & Karides, 2022). In our research and based on our comparative approach, we show the function of language in the fine‐tuning of belonging or exclusion for young academics who, while privileged in various ways, are newcomers both in a foreign academic field and in the academic workforce.…”

“…‘Belonging’, on the other hand, enables us to identify subtle lines of becoming incorporated as well as fine‐tuned forms of symbolic and practical barriers (Halse, 2018)—unlike ‘integration’, which often implies far‐reaching requirements for immigrants' entry into the host countries' institutions (De Waal, 2020). Moreover, belonging as a form of inclusion allows us to consider migrants' multiple belongings as attachments to places and (local, national and transnational) communities, which are (re) negotiated depending on migrants' strategies (Pawlak & Goździak, 2020) and the foreign (academic) environment (Rita & Karides, 2022).…”

Investigating Tenure Experiences of Foreign-Born Women Faculty in Engineering at the California State University System

“…Most studies focused on gender in engineering do not consider the FB status of the faculty, while those that study trajectories of FB faculty do not focus on gendered experience, resulting in FB women faculty being overlooked and understudied. A small number of researchers (e.g., Wells [6], Foote et al [7], Akulli [5], Rita, and Karides [8]) have studied the issues related to FB faculty in STEM. While data on international students are publicly available (e.g., ASEE [1], NSB-NSF [3]), collecting the data for faculty is very difficult because of privacy issues and rapid changes in residency status.…”