Mobilities and Margins
Transnational Lives of ASEAN Language Education Teachers
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- Description
- Contents
- About
Mobilities and Margins explores the lived experiences of English and multilingual language teachers across Southeast Asia as they navigate transnational mobility, inequality and identity in global higher education. Drawing on ethnographic research and narrative inquiry, Mark Ulla examines how educators’ movements across borders shape their professional lives while exposing them to racialized hierarchies, native‑speakerism and professional precarity.
Situated within applied linguistics, language teacher education and mobility studies, Mobilities and Margins foregrounds ASEAN educators whose voices remain marginal in dominant accounts of academic mobility. Their stories reveal the paradox of mobility: while transnational movement offers opportunities for growth and recognition, it also reproduces colonial legacies, cultures of Whiteness and unequal regimes of value in language education.
By centering teachers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, Mobilities and Margins reframes ASEAN language educators not as peripheral actors but as knowledge producers and agents of resistance. Chapters appeal to scholars, graduate students and practitioners interested in academic mobility, transnational education, teacher identity and social justice in global language education.
Chapter 1. Globalization, Migration, and Teacher Mobility
- Chapter 2. Understanding English Language Teaching in the ASEAN Region
- Chapter 3. Mobility, Precarity, and Professional Identity among Filipino English Language Teachers in Cambodia
- Chapter 4. Mobility as a Facilitator of Professional Development: Myanmar Language Educators in the Philippines
- Chapter 5. Mobility as a Transformative Process in the Formation of Identity among Indonesian Language Educators in Thailand
- Chapter 6. Mobility as Reflection and Transformation: Identity and Agency among Thai English Language Teachers in Thailand
- Chapter 7. Mobility Beyond Choice: Filipino Teachers’ Negotiation of Legitimacy in Thailand’s ELT Spaces
- Chapter 8. Negotiating Legitimacy Beyond Native-Speakerism: A Vietnamese Teacher's Transnational Journey in Thailand
- Chapter 9. Reimagining Teacher Mobility in ASEAN: Synthesis, Reflections, and Future Directions
Mark Bedoya Ulla is an Associate Professor of English as a Foreign Language at the School of Languages and General Education and the Center Director of the Research Center for Language Teaching and Learning at Walailak University, Thailand. He holds a Doctor of Communication degree from the University of the Philippines Open University and a PhD in Language Education from Saint Louis University, Baguio City. His research interests include queer language teacher identity, critical qualitative methods, technology and language teaching, and gender in language education. He is also the author of the book “Queer Teachers’ Agency in Language Education,” published by Emerald Publishing in 2025.