Speaker
Description
Each of us inhabits multiple, intersecting identities that shape our lived experiences. As a white woman living in Japan, I navigate life as both a global majority and a local minority. I am a fluent Japanese speaker, a mother to two bilingual, bicultural children, a PhD student in my 40s, an EFL educator, and a researcher focusing on the educational experiences of immigrant children and the teachers who support them in rural Japan. My multiple identities interweave, conflict, and reshape one another in both personal and professional contexts, all the while shaping how I engage with my work, my community, and myself. This presentation draws on autoethnography and reflective practice to examine how my various identities influence and complicate each other. Despite linguistic fluency and cultural familiarity, I often carry a quiet struggle to be seen and accepted as legitimate in the spaces I inhabit, academic, professional, and communal. As I study children negotiating belonging, I, too, am negotiating my own. By applying an ecological perspective, I situate these struggles within the broader systems, institutional, cultural, and familial that shape both my own experience and those of the immigrant families I study. I will explore how power dynamics, cultural assumptions, and relational networks influence legitimacy and belonging across contexts. Ultimately, this talk seeks to open space for critical conversations about how we as educators, researchers, parents, and individuals embody and challenge systems of inclusion and exclusion. Through a reflective lens, I aim to explore the intricate dynamics of navigating cultural boundaries while juggling multiple and evolving roles.