Transnational Doctoral Students' Identity Negotiation and Translanguaging Practices: A Critical Review of Autoethnographic and Related Research (2020-2026)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32493/ljlal.v8i2.62825Keywords:
Autoethnography, Critical literature review, Identity negotiation, Translanguaging, Transnational doctoral studentsAbstract
Transnational doctoral students increasingly use autoethnography and related first-person qualitative methods to examine how academic identities are negotiated across languages, institutions, and national borders. This critical review synthesises research published from 2020 to July 2026 on identity negotiation, translanguaging, academic writing, emotional labour, and methodological innovation among transnational and international doctoral students. A targeted search of Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and ERIC was combined with backward and forward citation tracing. The literature was analysed comparatively by research context, conceptual orientation, method, and contribution. Four findings are central. First, doctoral identity is constructed as temporal, relational, and institutionally regulated rather than as a stable status. Second, translanguaging functions not merely as linguistic support but as epistemic and identity work in writing, supervision, and AI-mediated composing. Third, collaborative, poetic, arts-based, and critical autoethnographies have broadened what counts as doctoral knowledge. Fourth, the field remains geographically concentrated on East Asian scholars in Anglophone destinations and gives limited attention to postcolonial multilingual settings, supervisors' perspectives, disciplines beyond language education, and intervention-oriented research. The review argues for a broader empirical geography and for doctoral pedagogies that recognise multilingual repertoires as intellectual resource.
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