ABSTRACT
Politics of "special population" in US American higher education have been contested around discourses of educational fairness, (in)equality, (un)accessibility, difference, accommodation, and (de)humanization. This chapter considers the risk of characterizing non-native, English-speaking international students as a distinct special population with population-distinctive educational challenges. Various special populations need to be studied for their own contextual, historical, and instructional particularities and complexities, as they are uniquely situated in education. The English hegemony, the mode of information production, and the political economy of translation contribute to the historical increase of non-Native students on US American campuses. Japan has long complicated histories with the West, the United States of America, and English hegemony. Liminality and imitation are significant in understanding of non-native students' English learning and their liminal state of bi/multilingualism within English hegemony. Desire functions as a significant focus for understanding non-native students' liminal experience in their English learning and US American education.
