Anyarat Nattheeraphong

Purpose: In contexts where heteronormativity remains deeply embedded in educational environments, LGBTQ students often encounter significant challenges in expressing their identities and exercising agency. This qualitative study aims to explore how three Thai LGBTQ university students navigate their identities within intercultural communication settings shaped by cultural expectations, power asymmetries and normative discourses. Design/methodology/approach: Grounded in Positioning Theory and a poststructuralist view of agency, the research draws on snake interviews and semi-structured interviews to capture participants’ evolving narratives. Findings: Findings reveal how participants engage in both self-positioning and interactive positioning to assert their identities and negotiate belonging in school, university, online intercultural exchanges and international student camps. Students’ agency is expressed through subtle resistance to binary gender norms, strategic self-disclosure and inspiration drawn from LGBTQ role models. While constraints persist, especially in culturally conservative encounters, university spaces and peer support emerged as enabling contexts for identity affirmation and agentive action. Originality/value: This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how discourse, identity and agency intersect in intercultural experiences, and calls for more inclusive practices that empower LGBTQ students to participate fully and authentically in global learning environments.

Cultural exchange is increasingly becoming an essential activity of higher education as the world continues to experience widespread ethnocentrism because of war, migration, political provocation, and nationalism. Research in areas related to cultural exchange have also increased with the rise of teacher and student mobility, leading to an exciting body of scholarship. Several aspects of intercultural communication, however, remain under-researched in the study of cultural exchange. One such example is intercultural responsibility. The current study adds to this body of work by investigating how Muslim students that were part of a cultural exchange program in Thailand used notions of intercultural responsibility to make sense of their encounters and identities. The findings show that national and religious identities are both barriers to, and resources for, intercultural communication in general, and the social practices of Muslim students in particular. Intercultural responsibility is important to scholars and educators, as it can empower students to become agentive in their participation in intercultural communication, allowing them to reflect on and utilize their linguistic, cultural, and historical repertoire when interacting with individuals and communities that do not share their same cultural traditions and practices.

This article presents the main qualitative findings from a mixed-methods study which applied Zoltán Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System to explore the L2 motivation of 291 non-English major students in a regional university in Thailand. This article focuses on exploring three highlymotivated underprivileged students’ English motivation to gain insights into the extent to which the students’ possible L2-related selves and L2 learning experiences influence their L2 motivation. Also explored were the participants’ significant others’ perspectives on the participants’ English learning in order to gain a more holistic picture of the phenomena under study and to ensure data triangulation. Data were collected using a range of methods including semi-structured interviews and Snake interviews with the three main participants. Unstructured interviews were conducted with the main participants’ significant others. The interview transcripts were analyzed using content analysis. The findings revealed that there was a balance between the hope-for and feared selves, enabling the participants’ possible selves to motivate them in their English learning. The results also showed that the students’ L2 learning experience provided an immediate learning environment which fostered their development and motivated them in their English learning. These findings yielded important insights into how students’ L2-related selves play a crucial role in motivating them in their L2 learning as well as how policy planners, educators, administrators, teachers and parents can help create an environment which promotes L2 learning and motivation in their respective contexts.