Mapping belonging and intersectionality: international TESOL graduate students’ experiences in Korea

This study explores how multilingual international graduate students in South Korea negotiate identity, belonging, and legitimacy within an educational landscape shaped by racialised and linguistic hierarchies. Using a multimodal qualitative design that integrates linguistic mapping, written reflections, and focus group interviews, we analyze the narratives of three students enrolled in a TESOL graduate programme at a private university in Korea. Guided by intersectionality, the study explores how racial, national, and linguistic positionalities produce fluid and ambivalent experiences of belonging across transnational spaces. Specifically, we examine how participants perceive and navigate language ideologies, including accent discrimination and structural barriers to professional legitimacy. Findings reveal that while participants experience recognition, expressive freedom, and community within their academic programme, these localised forms of belonging remain constrained by broader institutional and ideological structures tied to race and nationality. The multimodal data illuminate affective and ideological distinctions, illustrating how, among these three participants, belonging and legitimacy were semiotically and emotionally organised. The study offers context-specific insights into how transnational belonging may operate intersectionally in a non-Western TESOL setting, while demonstrating the analytic value of multimodal, participant-generated methods for surfacing affective and ideological dimensions of identity that verbal narrative alone may not capture.