ABSTRACT This article examines how international students from Global South countries negotiate employability in the UK through language, identity work, and intercultural adaptation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with students from six countries, it explores how they navigate high-stakes career contexts by recalibrating self-presentation, language use, and strategic timing. The findings identify four trajectories: linguistic recalibration, hybridised self-presentation, temporal misalignment, and policy-responsive adaptation. The article highlights both student agency and structural constraints, showing how language and power shape visibility, legitimacy, and opportunity in transnational higher education.

ABSTRACT This paper reports on a field investigation of the communicative strategies observed at Polish international airports. The topic is particularly relevant in light of the lexical and grammatical proximity between the most common languages of the area – Polish and East Slavic (Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian) – which in principle allows for partial mutual intelligibility. Data were collected through unobtrusive observation of naturally occurring interactions involving Polish speakers, primarily employees of airport services, and East Slavic speakers (mainly travellers). The analysis reveals a continuum of communicative strategies, ranging from the use of linguae francae, through various forms of L2 use, to prototypical intercomprehension.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how sustainability-oriented higher education, when designed to view intercultural responsibility as an ethical and relational practice, enables students to position themselves as globally responsible actors. Based on a narrative analysis of Thai undergraduates, the findings show how programme students experience ethical transformations from initial discomfort to dialogic accountability, and from competence-based skills to lived responsibility. The analysis demonstrates how reflexive positioning, vulnerability, and solidarity are central to addressing injustice and ecological crisis. These findings are used to argue that dialogic and participatory educational spaces foster students’ ethical reimagining as intercultural agents of change.

ABSTRACT Passing is generally understood as the strategic act of being perceived as a member of a group other than one's own. This study reframes passing as an audience-sensitive practice shaped by passers' metaperception and metalinguistic awareness. Analysis of Chinese Singaporeans' passing experiences indicates that global mobility expands motivations for passing beyond traditional community-bound settings. While abroad, participants make linguistic adaptations to appear culturally unmarked, framing these practices as pragmatic responses to situational risks rather than long-term identity alignment. Notably, passing decisions are driven less by personal evaluations of ascribed groups than by participants' anticipations of the audience's sociolinguistic competence.

ABSTRACT This article employs Bakhtinian dialogism to create reflexive narratives that illustrate identity formation in the context of migration. Starting from the assumption that engaging dialogically with stories is a powerful tool to resist one-dimensional narratives, in this study, we engage dialogically with the writing of Italian author Igiaba Scego. Considering the inherent dialogism of texts, we aim to encourage the active reading of narrative through a polyphony that enmeshes our voices with those of the author of the texts and the characters that inhabit them. We argue that intercultural understanding emerges from this dialogic engagement with the words of others.

ABSTRACT Employing journey as a critical lens of inquiry, this article interweaves theoretical analysis of anti-migrant narratives with empirical observation to examine hostile policies towards forced migratory journeys into Europe and the UK as an enactment of fear-based imaginaries of the ‘refugee journey’. The paper develops the concept of inhospitality pending return, with focus on practices of inhospitality in places traditionally associated with leisure and tourism, such as ferries. The authors argue that this kind of inhospitality is shaped by a context of hostile European approaches to journeys of forced migration; these are informed by, and in turn reinforce, fear-based imaginaries.

ABSTRACT This article examines two community-based initiatives supporting the linguistic, social, and health-related inclusion of South Asian women in Catalonia. Using culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies and participatory action research, it explores how co-constructed educational practices focused on language and health education foster agency, participation, and empowerment. Through discourse and thematic analysis, we identified pedagogical and relational dimensions that enabled the transformation of educational norms, validated linguistic and cultural knowledge and encouraged collaboration. By analyzing tensions, negotiations, and adaptations, the study shows how inclusive, community-rooted education can challenge deficit narratives, inform justice-oriented pedagogy, and shape teacher education and inclusive policy design.

ABSTRACT Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, this narrative explores my journey as a Filipina navigating Edinburgh amid heightened anti-Asian racism. A chance encounter with graffiti transformed how I understood space, identity, and resistance. Through personal reflection, the article highlights graffiti's potential as a form of intercultural communication and a site of societal resilience. Often dismissed as vandalism, these public messages offered solidarity and affirmation. Methodologically, this article emphasizes the value of serendipitous data in qualitative research, showing how unexpected moments can powerfully shape inquiry, amplify marginalized voices, and reframe dominant narratives during times of crisis.

ABSTRACT I present a sociosemiotic approach to culture/interculturality reconceptualised as non-/sharing in semiotic practices. I illustrate the non-/sharing dimensions and degrees derived from attributions of provenance in food-related Facebook groups. Several socialisation dimensions compete and combine in interaction, opening lines of flight challenging essentialised boundaries and ideas of multi/interculturality as necessarily tied to nationalities/ethnicities and/or mother tongues. The approach provides an analytical lens/toolkit to examine diversity and sharing co-construction in semiotic resources/practices in any communicative contexts, making it useful vis-a-vis a landscape of growing nationalisms and anti-immigration propaganda on one hand, and internal societal divisions and polarisations on the other.