Disrupting epistemic and institutional racism in applied linguistics and TESOL: a critical trioethnographic dialogue

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 socioeconomic and geopolitical 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 article engages in a critical authoring of the ‘selves’ through trioethnography 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 article 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.