This paper explores the challenges to higher education and the academic community in light of increasing ethnic and cultural diversity. Knowledge is not objective, neutral and separate from the knower but knowers are all implicated in the ways they construe knowledge. Consequently a minority student shares her own story of immigrating to the United States from Argentina and of attending institutions of higher education as a member of an ethnic minority. She explores the challenges that diversity present to the dominant culture and community and the problem of how to construct a community centered on differences. Emancipatory knowledges provide a framework and language to build community on the basis of diversity. Emancipatory knowledges force individuals to make sex, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity and other differences central to the construction of community. They direct individuals and institutions to examine the particular ways in which political, cultural, and institutional practices support a community centered on differences. Emancipatory knowledges make people aware that to build community, institutions must be transformed. Emancipatory knowledges are centered on the analysis of texts as social and historical constructions that reflect the author's subjectivity. (Contains 38 references.) (JB)