Editorial

Asia's vast ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity has been shaped by centuries of migration, empire, colonialism, nation-state formation, and global politicaleconomic change (Croissant & Trinn, 2009;Mackerras, 2003).Yet diversity has rarely translated into equality.Across the region, ethnic minorities, Indigenous peoples, migrants, sexual minorities, and religious communities continue to experience marginalization through overlapping regimes of power embedded in state policies, institutional practices, dominant cultural norms, and epistemic hierarchies.These processes do not operate along a single axis.Rather, marginalization is produced through the intersection of ethnicity with gender, language, sexuality, religion, class, mobility, and historical positioning (Edwards & Roces, 2000; Jolley, 2022).Although these phenomena have expanded globally, a notable gap exists in understanding how these dynamics play out, specifically in Asia.This special issue, Intersecting Identities: Ethnicity, Minority Status, and Marginalization in Asia, brings together interdisciplinary scholarship that critically examines how these intersections shape lived experience, social exclusion, and forms of resistance across Asia and its diasporas.Intersectionality serves as the conceptual and methodological backbone of this collection (Bauer et al., 2021;Misra et al., 2020).Moving beyond additive or categorical understandings of identity, the contributions demonstrate how power operates relationally and contextually, producing differentiated outcomes even within the same social groups.At the same time, the articles foreground agency, highlighting how marginalized communities negotiate, contest, and rework structures of domination.In doing so, the issue aligns closely with the Journal for Ethnic and Cultural Studies' commitment to critical, justice-oriented, and socially engaged scholarship.Several contributions examine how contemporary technologies and institutions mediate inclusion and exclusion for marginalized populations.Empowering Migrant Communities through Machine Translation Literacy: A Pathway to Socio-Economic Inclusion situates language access at the intersection of migration status, labor precarity, and digital inequality.Drawing on a pilot training program for Myanmar migrant workers, the study moves beyond celebratory narratives of technology by critically examining participants' uneven familiarity with machine translation tools, privacy concerns, and usability challenges.By foregrounding reflective practice and observation, the article demonstrates that digital tools can only function as mechanisms of empowerment when accompanied by context-sensitive training that accounts for linguistic background, everyday needs, and structural vulnerability.The emphasis on machine translation literacy rather than mere access underscores how technological inclusion itself is shaped by power relations.