Transnational multilingual identities, emotions, and belonging in White neoliberal spaces in U.S. higher education

This study examines how transnational, multilingual undergraduate students navigate identities, emotions, and belonging within predominantly White and neoliberal U.S. higher education spaces. Drawing on a multiple-case study of four international students at a Midwestern liberal arts college, the research investigates how they negotiate identities across linguistic, racial, and institutional boundaries and what these processes mean for their emotional well-being and sense of belonging. Framed by theories of transnationalism, belonging, and identity negotiation, the study reveals how students confront racialized linguistic ideologies and the performative nature of institutional diversity. While academic and social exclusion often reinforced feelings of marginalization, students also crafted spaces of connection through cultural affinity groups and strategic self-positioning. Data from go-along interviews and classroom observations were analyzed to trace the affective and discursive contours of belonging. Findings underscore how multilingual students navigate linguistic and epistemic injustice through strategic adaptation and subtle resistance. While confronting racialized language ideologies and structural exclusions, they engage in affective meaning-making, curate spaces of temporary belonging, and exercise agentive disidentification within dominant institutional structures. The study argues for a shift from inclusion-as-assimilation to belonging-as-transformation, calling on higher education to embed multilingual perspectives, emotional reciprocity, and linguistic justice into pedagogy and policy.