Interview with Professor Rifat A. Salam: Culture, Gender, and Research

I interviewed Professor Rifat A. Salam, an Associate Professor and Deputy Chairperson of Social Sciences, Human Services, and Criminal Justice at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). She is currently studying.

Her bio reads:

“I received my Ph.D. in sociology from New York University. My book, “Negotiating Tradition, Becoming American: Family, Gender and Autonomy for Second Generation South Asians” describes the experiences of South Asian Americans whose families came to the United States in the post-1965 period following changes to immigration. My research interests focus broadly on the experiences of South Asian and Asian Americans.

An active member of the American Sociological Association, I have presented and organized workshops on undergraduate teaching and learning, as well as workshops on academic careers. Most recently, I participated in the third iteration of the ASA Task Force on Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major and am one of the authors of The Sociology Major in the Changing Landscape of Higher Education.

At BMCC, I am a coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum and focus on faculty development and training to certify faculty to teach Writing Intensive courses. Though my primary interest in pedagogy is writing, I actively pursue pedagogical strategies to provide students with transformative learning opportunities. Most recently, I am part of a multidisciplinary team on an NSF-funded project to develop computational thinking skills across the curriculum.

I am deeply committed to the mission of community colleges and being part of creating academic experiences which will enhance all areas of our students’ lives.” (bio and photo from BMCC Directory)

Preliminary Thoughts:

On Google Scholar, I see that my work is referenced a lot in psychology articles. My findings have always had very practical implications for people who are working with South Asians in a clinical therapeutic setting because it helps people understand where people are coming from. Thinking about the generations, my parents were part of the first group that immigrated after 1965. Before that, there were very restrictive immigration quotas. So, we were essentially going through the system as the first wave. Many of our teachers didn’t pronounce our names correctly, nor did they care too. As we went through life and sought out information or help, we didn’t have people who understood our experiences or how family dynamics are so important to us. That is one thing that’s changed; there are now therapists and folks who are of South Asian origin but grew up in this country who understand that experience, which I think is so important when you’re working with a given population.

One of the things that I did was my dissertation research and I touched on this. A few years ago, at a keynote speech at Seton Hall, they had a Women and Gender conference. I wrote about South Asians in digital contexts because many South Asians were involved in the early days of the Internet, not only in terms of the technology side of things but also in producing content and blogging.

There were a lot of early adopters. I don’t know if you know this, but my brother is actually a public figure. He’s a wonderful guy, but we have very different points of view, in terms of politics. He is the president of the Manhattan Institute right now. Over the many past years, he’s mostly been a writer and a political commentator. He’s worked for various think tanks but he’s also done a lot of writing, television work, editing, and other things like that. The reason why I mentioned that is that he and a bunch of friends started a politics blog very early on in the 90s. There was a South Asian blog with multiple authors which for me, as somebody in their 20s, was such a revelation because I did not grow up with a lot of people who have had similar experiences other than my family and friends.

I’m Bangladeshi. But, when we came to the US a lot of my father’s and my parents’ friends were from West Bengal. So, we had this community of people that I grew up with from the time I was eight or nine years old. I still see them. In many ways, they’re like immigrants from communities that are almost like a reproduction of the extended family networks that you would have. My husband is a European American and a white guy from Texas. Although, interestingly, his two older brothers were Pakistani so he has some insights from their experience. But, now that we’ve been married and known each other for so long, he gets it. When anybody needs anybody or there is a wedding or a children’s party, etc, you just connect with the other people. That is a really big part of the support network that people have.

So, people in my generation, that first cohort, have children. Our children are now at the age where they’re going to soon start their families. We’re sort of building on the things that our families and our parents did. In some ways, I have a little bit of nostalgia because we had to find our own way. I was telling one of my students recently that when my parents immigrated, there was no internet. There were no Skype calls or calling people on WhatsApp. It was a really very different experience and the immigrant experiences were hugely mediated by technology and communications. That is something that I’m really curious about because I’ve been thinking about different ways that I can revise my earlier research but adapt it to a newer context.

I am especially interested in exploring how South Asian immigrants fare as compared to European immigrants. The biggest thing is that European immigrants are white, so they could almost assimilate fully anywhere, once they don’t have an accent anymore. No one considers them anything else. But, there’s a concept in Asian American studies where we talk about Asians being forever foreigners, because of the way that they look. Maybe that’s changing, but I think there’s a little bit of that left. Of course, if you have people of mixed backgrounds that adds another layer to it.

One thing that I would say is a little different about me than probably most typical people who are writing scholarship or who are coming out of this field is that I made a decision to stay in the CUNY system and to be a professor at BMCC. When I first got the job, a lot of people thought that I would only be here for a while and then I would publish my way out to a more traditional university.

I have to say that one of the things I love about my job is my students. They’re incredibly diverse, and they’re often people coming from backgrounds that are less privileged and have a diversity of experiences. Not necessarily just social class or race, but students who have come back after many years after leaving college. It might not have worked for them while they were young, but now they’re back and they’re just incredibly interested in studying various topics.

I focus on helping my students if they’re interested, even doing many research projects, so they understand how knowledge is constructed. I also do a lot of things where I try to impact other faculties. So, at this point, I don’t teach that much but I work with other faculty and teach them to — I don’t want to sound arrogant — but I teach them to be better teachers. I’m also very involved with the American Sociological Association, a Senate committee that sets the standards for the sociology major because I think all of those things are really important, especially because different courses of study have to keep up with changes in the workplace.

A sociology degree today should not be what it was when I was an undergraduate. I feel very passionate about teaching a new population. Even if my class is the only sociology class you ever take, it could still be valuable. If I could give you something like a lens or tools for how to achieve the things that you want to achieve in your life; or a way of looking at the world around you, your relationships; or insight on how to make choices (both personal and professional), it would be worth it.

So, that is something that I’m really passionate about. In some ways, that makes my sort of, like, research and scholarship a little bit bifurcated. I will focus on one thing for a while and then get back to it. Keeping up with the South Asian American population is really important because I think that there are more of us in public life than people realize. Our experience is not well understood, and there are a lot of stereotypes.

I had a student a couple of years ago, whose father was a Bangladeshi immigrant. When the kid was in my class and when I met him, I assumed that his background was probably more like mine: that his parents were professionals. Just because his interests aligned with mine, I just made that assumption. In actuality, his father had gone to LaGuardia and was studying opera and music.

Finally, I want to mention that there’s also a big gap between parental understanding and that of their children. But, when their children get a certain kind of education, their perspective on things might change.

Could you talk about how you personally got involved in studying South Asians in the United States, Sociology, Immigration, and Race & Ethnicity? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities?

Interestingly, when I started college, I had wanted to be a psychology major. I had taken a lot of different classes. I was also really interested in history and international relations. Since I majored in sociology, I was really interested in larger social dynamics, like society-wide patterns and organizations. I was particularly interested in the dynamics of NGOs and how they operate in South Asia.

There were a lot of really interesting case studies that I had thought that I might conduct and look at; I had a very specific broader interest, if that makes sense. But, my mentor in grad school knew I wanted to do something in sociology. She studies family and gender. I was a research assistant for another sociologist who does family and gender work and we were just talking and she kept saying that she wished that I conducted a specific study about patients about a topic in which there really wasn’t a lot. Her husband, my dissertation chair, is a political science professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, and he was doing a huge study of second-generation immigrant New Yorkers. The unfortunate thing was that for whatever reason, he did not include South Asians. It’s funny because my mentor would talk to her husband about the work that I was doing, and later he said that he really regretted not including South Asians in that population and that it was an oversight. But I think that tells you something: this is a significant population in New York City, and the scholar excluded South Asians.

At the time one of the things I found really terrifying was that the research study that I eventually proposed would require me to do interviews. I asked my advisor “Why on earth would anybody talk to me?” I had a long list of questions asking people about their childhoods, how their parents immigrated, how they decided on college, and all the stuff about dating and marrying. But, I didn’t know if people would be willing to share this information. But, thankfully, I found out that people wanted to tell their stories. I was really pleasantly surprised. And I am so grateful for all of these really busy people who gave me time to tell me their stories. One person was a medical resident, and they had very little time — but they still gave me the interview. We literally met at a bar across the street from the hospital when they had a break. I was just really grateful; it tells you a lot about how people want to tell their stories and that it was very validating for them. In some ways, it was because I represented somebody familiar even though they didn’t know me personally. When they told me things, they knew that I would not judge them. So, I think that South Asians, even though they’re not a huge proportion of the population, have become extremely influential in a lot of different ways.

Interestingly, I was joking with somebody that I’ve probably been related to most of the Bangladeshi people that you’re ever likely to see on TV. But, that’s not quite the case anymore, because there are many, many more people.

I was thinking of Sal Khan, the Khan Academy guy. The last time I saw him he was literally two years old. He doesn’t remember me or have any contact because his father, who my father knew, died when he was very young.

So, we just completely lost touch but I remember seeing him on something and I was like, “Wait, I know who that is!” But again, this is not something that I would necessarily have predicted; he’s incredibly influential. It’s the same with Nikki Haley and other people. I could not have ever imagined that an Indian American woman would be running for president. Like, it was just astounding to me.

So, in general, I think South Asians are a population that has contributed a lot, is undervalued, and in some ways, misunderstood. But, I do think it’s changing to a large extent.

What were your motivations for starting to write “Negotiating Tradition, Becoming American: Family, Gender, and Autonomy for Second Generation South Asians”? Can you talk more about how it analyzes Second Generation South Asians through the lens of arranged marriage?

I had all of these people who gave me their life stories in these interviews. When you’re doing interviews, specifically social science ones, qualitative interviews usually organize your questions in a certain way around thematic or chronological elements.

To some extent, that structure is built in. But then, you have to take all of that information and then see if you can find certain patterns. You have to find some framework within which to analyze all of that and I wanted to do something a little bit different from most of the work that had been out there, which was mostly about the immigrants that came. There were some studies about the second generation, but there weren’t as many. So what I wanted to do is take the literature, from gender, family, and literature and their corresponding theories about gender.

At conferences, that body of sociology is over here, and then you have the Immigration Studies folks separately. I wanted to bring those two pieces of literature together. I was looking at other kinds of theoretical works about how men and women choose their path in life. My mentor wrote a really important book about how men and women starting in the post-1960s or 1970s negotiated the changing family and gender roles. She discussed some of the very difficult decisions that they had to make, how they were grappling with these changes, and gender role expectations. So, I really wanted to bring that in because I think that South Asian Americans are like other Americans in many ways: they are making decisions about careers. All the same decisions about how to balance their family lives, whether to put off getting married, etc are happening. So, when I was thinking about it, I used arranged marriage as an analytic lens. In other words, it’s not that I wasn’t interested in arranged marriage, but it was that it wasn’t really about arranged marriage. It was really about using that as a structure within which to look at people’s decision-making.

There’s a tradition in sociology, specifically old-school sociology, called a deviant case analysis, where a sociologist will look at some phenomenon or some behaviors that deviate from the norm.

When you look at the deviation, you better understand the norms, because you are studying when the norms are broken. I saw arranged marriage as something that was as far from American values and expectations around dating and marriage; it was almost the polar opposite. I thought that looking at people’s experiences, viewpoints, attitudes, etc around this concept of arranged marriage would be an interesting and very different lens to look at the assimilation process.

The extent to which people feel American is really unique because there’s a lot of assimilation research. When they talk about marriage they talk about it as if immigrants marry into the larger culture. For example, if I’m a Greek immigrant or a child of Greek immigrants marrying other people of Greek descent, then according to old-school assimilation, I’m not becoming fully assimilated. But, what I wanted to argue is that they were just as simulated and just as American. So, I decided to look at the extent to which people’s decision-making went far away from this concept of arranged marriage.

I found three different sorts of pathways that people took. A lot of times it had to do with their earlier civilizations, parental expectations, and how they negotiated them. I define the majority of people in my group as “new traditionalists.” These are people that are not having the arranged marriages that people in my parents’ generation had. There’s a great deal of autonomy.

Nevertheless, many people limit themselves to people of the same background and then filter. Except, they don’t do it as explicitly. But most people do end up marrying someone of the same race or religion.

I’ve had many conversations with people who judge this as “exotic” or “other than normative.” American mate selection still does the sorting and the filtering. It’s just that people are not explicit about it. It’s not really random who you want to “fall in love with” because there are so many filtering devices based on where you’re likely to meet people and that kind of thing.

I also wanted to respect people’s decisions because I think that in many ways people feel very “othered.” If you married somebody that your parents wanted you to marry, for example, people might “other” you — even though this happens all the time just not as explicitly. There’s this sort of “othering” that I always found troubling.

On a separate note, there are some aspects of the culture that I really appreciate. It wasn’t until I had my own children that I realized this specific point: if I asked my mother to watch my children, she would. She would drop everything. That’s what she’s gonna do vs. like, I hear from my peers that their parents are too busy to watch my kids. So, they’re not spending as much time with their grandchildren, which is unheard of in our culture. Those are things that I really value and I don’t take them for granted.

What advice do you have for those interested in fields similar to your areas of interest? Do you have blogs, podcasts, or summer opportunities that you recommend students explore?

I really want to see what the approach is like as the people in my generation approach their middle and later years. I’m curious about their decision-making. The choices that they’re going to make around their adult children are something really interesting to look at. This third generation as well is a group that I want to look at. I’m interested in the South Asian community and its communications and media. I want to explore what it means to be South Asian now because I think politically, it’s very different because of the influence of current politics. Indian Americans or people of Indian national origin are the majority of the folks that we might consider South Asian, just thinking numerically. One thing that’s very different is that Modi’s politics have seeped into the American context, just not as explicitly. This is something that I have seen in a lot of contexts, especially in online communities.

Also, I hope to kind of continue to come across diverse groups of people in my teaching. I enjoy mentoring students a lot. That’s one thing that I have the opportunity to do at CUNY.

As for advice, for high school students, I would really recommend trying to get some research experience. I teach a class on technology and society, and instead of giving them a research paper, I give them the opportunity to analyze something and make a case study in depth of something original. I think whenever that’s available to you as an opportunity, you want to try things out before you commit yourself.

I will say that academics, specifically higher education, are in a lot of turmoil. So, it’s not really a great career path in terms of if you want stability. If I were to do it over again, I think I would have stuck to doing things more organizationally. I think I would still like to have a PhD, and I’d still like to have the skills, but I would encourage others (like my grad students) to try to get broad skill sets so that the research skills and knowledge they acquire can be adapted across different contexts and different career paths.