Intersecting Fragilities: Identity, Emotional-Ethical Labour and Strategic Agency Among Female EFL Teachers in Post-Conflict Libya

This chapter examines the professional identities of female English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in post-conflict Libya, exploring how these identities are constructed, negotiated, and sustained within a fragile sociopolitical and educational landscape. Drawing on narrative inquiry and interpretive phenomenological analysis, the study highlights the intersection of pedagogical, institutional, and sociocultural fragilities that shape teachers’ experiences. Female EFL teachers navigate classrooms constrained by scarce resources, outdated curricula, and unstable administrative structures while simultaneously contending with entrenched gender norms and moral scrutiny. Central to their identity work is emotional–ethical labour, encompassing the regulation of emotions, the performance of moral and cultural propriety, and the provision of stability for students amid uncertainty. Complementing this, teachers exercise strategic agency through subtle, relational, and contextually grounded micro-strategies, including pedagogical adaptation, boundary-setting, and selective compliance. The chapter proposes an intersectional, decolonial model of teacher identity, situating identity as a product of structural negotiation, emotional–ethical labour, relational agency, and epistemic tensions surrounding English. This framework challenges universalist assumptions about teacher identity and professional agency, foregrounding the lived experiences of educators in fragile contexts and emphasizing the epistemic legitimacy of knowledge produced outside stable, Western-centric educational paradigms. The findings have significant implications for teacher development, educational policy, and applied linguistics research, highlighting the necessity of contextually responsive, gender-aware, and ethically grounded approaches to supporting teachers in post-conflict and fragile educational settings.