Realities of imagined communities: collective autoethnography of identities and emotions of Japanese female international academics in Australian universities

Abstract The present study is a collective autoethnography, exploring the academic identities of three international academics, all Japanese women who came to Australia in the late 1990s and have been working as Japanese language teachers and researchers in Australian universities for around 12 years. We began by writing about the experiences that had affected our academic identities, and the emotions triggered by those experiences, then exchanged these self-narratives, and discussed them as a group. We then wrote a second set of more reflective self-narratives. Here we collaboratively analyse these narratives and discussions using thematic analysis. After we started working full-time as academics, we faced the realities of Australian universities, our imagined communities. Lack of support from senior colleagues, the power of dominant White academics, the symbolic power of English, and the progress of neoliberalism have all triggered feelings of marginalisation in us. Our academic identities are complexly associated with sociopolitical aspects of universities, our immediate teaching and research contexts, and our linguistic and cultural backgrounds.