Scholars in the field of applied linguistics have drawn attention to epistemic exclusion and racialization that manifest in various practices—academic publishing, hiring practices, linguicism, and institutional discriminatory structures influenced by colonial and neoliberal thinking. As a consequence, they challenge the historical dominance of the North in the field that discriminates against Southern scholarship and researchers in the epistemic/geographic South. These Southern absences in the field necessitate and call for critical engagement with diverse subalternized epistemologies, discourses, and practices in global colonized contexts. Considering this pressing need, this chapter engages in a critical authoring of the “selves” through trio-autoethnography informed by decolonial intersectionality in an attempt to address multiple forms of oppression and develop coalitional consciousness. Thus, we three scholars from the geographic/epistemic South foreground our vulnerabilities and reflections navigating these landscapes. These accounts attest to the systemic barriers and subtle, yet pervasive, forms of racialization that persist within the structures of academia, especially those situated in the Anglo-West. In particular, the chapter highlights our Southern positionalities, traces our lived racialized “selves” and struggles in academia, and discusses strategies for Southern emergences in academia and in the field.

The Routledge Handbook of Race and Equity in Applied Linguistics provides an authoritative overview of research on racial and epistemic inequities in TESOL and applied linguistics. It focuses on intersecting systems of oppression in institutional, pedagogical, curricular, and policy spaces.

Across 27 chapters, contributors critically examine everyday policies and practices, such as hiring bias and discriminatory job ads, which disadvantage multilingual learners and teachers, while amplifying agentive voices seeking change. Organized into four parts and spanning the geographic and epistemic Global South and North, the handbook is both critique and praxis: it offers practical tools for valuing students’ full repertoires, challenging native-speaker norms, redesigning curricula and assessment, and linking classroom decisions to program and policy reform. It adopts diverse and groundbreaking lenses—linguistic racism, native-speakerism, commodified hiring, translanguaging, phenomenology, pedagogy of love, Ebùnlingualism, decolonial hermeneutics, intersectionality, and critical ethnographies—that counter linguistic, epistemic, racial, and institutional hegemonies.

This timely handbook charts a clear decolonial path for students and scholars in TESOL, Applied Linguistics, and Education, while equipping educators and policymakers with the tools to build more just and inclusive environments.

As schools become increasingly shaped by global migration, they emerge as contested spaces where cultural diversity coexists with entrenched racialized hierarchies. Within these landscapes, immigrant teachers often face epistemic silencing and symbolic racism that devalues their knowledge, linguistic repertoires, and professional identities. This chapter examines how immigrant teachers actively resist these exclusionary discourses and assert their right to teach, speak, and belong. Rather than being positioned solely as subjects of marginalization, these teachers engage in acts of pedagogical resistance by drawing on a pedagogy of love, an ethical, relational, and justice-oriented approach to teaching. Through counter-narratives and everyday practices, they challenge dominant ideologies rooted in colonial and white supremacist legacies and create more inclusive, affirming spaces for themselves and their students. Using an interpretive qualitative methodology, this study foregrounds the transformative work of immigrant teachers who, despite institutional constraints, advocate for humanizing pedagogies that honor difference, foster belonging, and disrupt normative educational paradigms.

In an increasingly interconnected yet unequal world, diversity, multilingualism, and multiculturalism are defining features of contemporary societies and educational spaces (Gao & Yang, 2023; Veliz, 2024a, 2024b, 2024c). Classrooms, communities, and institutions across the globe are shaped by the coexistence of multiple languages and cultural traditions, each carrying their own histories, epistemologies, and ways of knowing and being (Meighan, 2023; Shah, 2025). These plural realities challenge monolithic understandings of language, identity, and belonging, foregrounding the complex negotiations that occur when local linguistic and cultural repertoires meet dominant global norms. Yet, despite widespread recognition of linguistic and cultural diversity as assets, policies and practices in education often remain informed by assimilationist and monolingual assumptions (Fielding & Harbon, 2022; Piller, 2015; Slaughter & Cross, 2021; Veliz & Chen, 2024; Veliz et al., 2025) that privilege dominant colonial languages, most notably English, and ways of knowing and being over others (Meighan, 2022). It is within this tension between diversity as an ideal and inequity as a lived reality that the following discussion is situated.