Not Quite Foreign, Never Fully Belonging: Racialization of Southbound Policy Students in Taiwan

This paper critically examines how race and racialization shape the socio-cultural adjustment experiences of international students from New Southbound policy (NSP) countries in Taiwan. Drawing from a qualitative part conducted for my master’s thesis, which explored the coping strategies and adjustment processes of seven students from Southeast and South Asia through semi-structured interview, I reframe the data to center race as an analytical lens using the conceptual framework proposed by Glasgow (2009) which explains that racialization as the process through which social meanings are attached to perceived cultural or bodily differences, creating and maintaining hierarchies among groups. and Brondolo et al. (2009) framework which helped to describe the micro-level strategies students use to negotiate these challenges. Finding revealed that although Taiwan’s internationalization policies, such as the New Southbound Policy, promote regional academic mobility, students’ narratives reveal that racialization continues to shape their everyday experiences.