Language Teacher Identities in Times of Crisis

Being, becoming, and working as a language teacher today requires navigating intersecting crises (socioeconomic, cultural, political, and environmental) that profoundly shape professional identities and practices. Language teachers’ identity work is an embodied and performative act situated at the nexus of micro-level experiences and macro-level sociohistorical, economic, and political forces. These forces materialize through (in)visible borders and boundaries that manifest discourses of (neo)nationalism, ethnocentrism, racism, and xenophobia across time and space, (in)forming teachers’ negotiation of their identity work. Building upon this intricate interplay between the personal and the structural, this chapter explores how ideologies of place and space intersect with the construction of language teacher identities. It highlights the broader exclusionary (neo)nationalist, ethnocentric, and xenophobic narratives impacting language education and teachers’ professional trajectories through (in)visible yet powerful ideologies, discourses, symbols, and practices. In essence, I advocate for a more critical engagement with dominant narratives connected to language, race, ethnicity, and migration, positioning language teachers as transnational and translocal professionals. By framing identity formation as a complex, dynamic, context-dependent process across time and space, this chapter challenges static orientations to teacher development and calls for inclusive and glocally conscious pedagogical practices in an increasingly interconnected yet ideologically fragmented world.