Belonging and place for migrant teachers: A plurilogue with intersectionality, feminist new materialism and Asian-Indigenous relationality.

Aotearoa-New Zealand’s education system wrestles with the impact of increased cross-border migration – projections indicate that by 2040, a quarter of the student population would identify as Asian. This migration-induced superdiversity complicates the settler-Indigenous binary and its ensuing Tiriti-based commitments, where the belonging, place and responsibilities of Asian migrants remain largely unmapped. Complicating this narrative further is the mismatch between student and teacher diversity. While the student population becomes increasingly ethnically, linguistically, and racially diverse, the teaching workforce fails to reflect the demographic changes – only 6% of teachers identify as Asian. As such, limited scholarly attention has been paid to the experiences of belonging, relationality and accountability of Asian teachers in settler-colonial contexts. In this presentation, I articulate a theoretical framing for my narrative inquiry project on women teachers of Indian ethnicity and their experiences of belonging in Aotearoa New Zealand’s primary schools, through a plurilogue with intersectionality, feminist new materialism and Asian-Indigenous relationality. A plurilogue allows me to work through the tensions between various scholars and concepts productively, by centring multiplicity in the face of complex realities. Presented at the International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative (ISAN) 2026.