Flowing between in(visibility):Intersectional Identities of East and Southeast Asian Academics in UK High Education

<p class="MsoNormal">East and Southeast Asian (ESA) academics in UK higher education are simultaneously unseen and over-scrutinised, yet remain understudied. While identity scholarship has emphasised the relational and intersectional nature of identity, ESA academics’ positions are shaped by racialised, cultural, and migratory histories that are often overlooked. This paper examines how they perceive and navigate intersectional identities, and how these shape workplace experiences. <p class="MsoNormal">Using the visibility–invisibility–hypervisibility framework (Lewis &amp; Simpson, 2012), we conceptualise identity as both constraint and resource. The study draws on 40 semi-structured interviews across two UK universities—one research-intensive and one teaching-intensive—covering different disciplines, contract types, and career stages. Findings highlight three dynamics. First, identity complexity: participants’ experiences were shaped by overlapping factors such as race, gender, immigration background, contract status, and visa conditions, often making the causes of invisibility hard to disentangle. Second, identity flow: ESA academics moved across invisibility, visibility, and hypervisibility depending on context, though they mobilised hypervisibility less often than other racialised groups. Third, identity supplements: despite barriers such as language, isolation, and immigration restrictions, participants sustained careers by leveraging research excellence and, at times, family life to offset limited leadership visibility. <p class="MsoNormal">The study contributes to identity scholarship by theorising intersectional identity as complex, fluid, and supplementing, and extends the visibility–invisibility–hypervisibility framework to capture the constrained and uneven agency available to ESA academics. We reconceptualize these (in)visibility forms not merely as constraints imposed upon minoritized subjects, but as strategic resources for identity work and workplace navigation. Our participants actively shift between visibility states through purposeful identity performances, amplifying presence to counter invisibility, strategically withdrawing to mitigate hypervisibility, or pre-emptively projecting particular identities to shape how they are seen. This reframing reveals the sophisticated, often invisible labor that minoritized academics perform to navigate structural inequalities, while showing how agency operates even within constrained circumstances. By linking visibility fluidity to identity fluidity, we demonstrate how intersectional identities function simultaneously as sites of marginalization and as resources for resistance, offering a more nuanced understanding of how power, identity, and agency intersect in organizational contexts. It also calls for higher education institutions to design EDI policies responsive to this group’s specific challenges. <p class="MsoNormal"/>