ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to present a narrative of two women in academia through the lens of language and identity negotiation in their migration to Australia. Through the ‘partial collaborative autoethnographic practice’, the authors articulate the story of culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) women from two different contexts of the Global South, Ghana and Iraq, whose transposition to Australia elicited the involuntary social, linguistic and professional identity deterioration from being successful academics to experiencing language struggles and reaching lower social and professional status. Supported and contrasted with a story of the third author as a racially homogenous academic in Australia, who also comes from the Global South, and grounded in the theory of translocality, translingual identity and language diversity, this chapter explores the life trajectory of the first two authors, as Ghanaian and Iraqi women, characterised by sociolinguistic and cultural dispositions in their personal and professional lives. It informs studies on language, identity and migration on the linguistic, social and professional constraints for culturally and linguistically diverse migrants in the Global North, where any deviation from the norm is condemned. It also informs studies on migrant women in academia on complex themes of their identity as lone teachers and lone learners in their migration trajectory.
