Tales of an academic immigrant: An autoethnographic account

Abstract

I’ve struggled for quite a bit with my urge and reluctance to write about my experiences as an immigrant in the south and how they shifted when I came to the northeast. I am working within the resistance to better understand my self and positionalities within and outside of the social, cultural, and political context of the academe, both as a graduate student and now as a faculty member. I have been compelled to work on this piece with the hope that the process helps me theorize and understand what it means to be [perceived] as a racialized woman. I theorize the possibilities that spaces create for me (or any other person) to freely express the self, to be/come and grow, or the constraints such spaces could impose that erase and silence us.