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 the 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 the 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.