Bargaining identity: A transnational multilingual student's fight against raciolinguistic positioning in English departments

This study contributes to the limited research on linguistic racism in higher education settings. It examines a transnational multilingual student's experiences with the English language and English literature across Indian and US universities, and the influences of language ideologies on her academic pursuits. Qualitative methods were used to collect data that include the student's written reflection on her experiences, talks-around-text interviews, and artifacts of her academic work. Raciolinguistics and positioning theory support data analysis. Findings indicate that, across Indian and US universities, the student was continuously positioned by others as lacking in English competence, resulting in academic and psychological trauma for her. However, the student also exercised agentive resistance and fought to reposition herself as a legitimate speaker of English and student of English literature. Implications are offered for research, theory, and educational practice.