Beyond the Academic Pipeline for Asian Scholars

This book showcases and disrupts the academic pipeline for Asian and Asian-descent scholars who go through doctoral programs to their seniority in U.S. academia in Language Education. With a focus on care, mentorship, and collective healing for future Asian scholars in Language Education, the chapters in this book detail diverse experiences and strategies for overcoming inequity and power imbalance, with contributions from doctoral students and those on the tenure/tenured track or who choose alternative pathways beyond academia. Asian and Asian-descent TESOL and language scholars often face conflicts, struggles, and challenges, such as belonging, isolation, marginalization, exclusion, and institutional oppression without having agency, mentorship, and self-liberation during and after their doctoral programs in U.S-based academia. Chapters are grounded in critical, poststructural, feminist, decolonizing, and intersectional approaches to problematize and situate the interconnectedness of power, positioning, privilege/marginalization, dis/location, self-doubt, and well-being, and identities of Asian scholars in U.S.-based contexts. Additionally, contributions problematize what "Asianness" means and its relationship with other identities in academia for Asian scholars. This book offers on-the-ground and hands-on insights and practices of Asian TESOL and language scholars and serves as a foundational text for future doctoral programs to support marginalized populations in academia, especially Asian and Asian-descent students and scholars in Language Education (i.e., TESOL, Applied Linguistics, World Languages) and related fields.

Ethan Trinh (they/them) is Founder of Dr. Trinh's Foundation, an Atlanta-based nonprofit advancing educational access, scholarships, and global learning opportunities for rural and multilingual communities in and beyond the United States. They also serve as Associate Director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center, a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center at Georgia State University. Seoyoon Jang, Ph.D. (she/her) is a teaching assistant professor of Korean in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh.

Part 1: Foundations of Power, Care, and Belonging 1. Critical Reflections on Facing Pressures of Academia: Self-work, Mentorship, and Community 2. Challenging Reproduced Practices and Power Structures in Academy: One Teacher-Scholar's Critical Autoethnography 3. Speaking Otherwise: Power, Pathways, and Possibility in Language Education Part 2: Practices of Solidarity, Becoming, and Healing 4. Rising: Duoethnography for Decolonial Academic Mentorship 5. Reimagining Support Systems for Asian-American Scholars: A Duoethnographic Account 6. Establishing Professional Identity through Exercising Agency: Asian Female TESOLers' Doctoral Stories with Memory Writing 7. (Un)Silencing Liminal Identities Across Border Dreamscape: A Duoethnographic Study of Nepali Postgraduates Studying in the United States Part 3: Precarity and Alternative Pathways 8. Unmasking the Realities: Story of an Asian Mom Scholar in her Job Search journey 9. Breaking the Loop: A Narrative Inquiry of an International PhD Graduate in Academia 10. Examining Positionality and Building Community