Recent research on the co-constitution of race and language has intensified debates about inclusion and exclusion in educational settings, particularly in higher education. This scholarship exposes how monolingual, nationalist ideologies – deeply rooted in racial formations – are embedded in apparently neutral expectations of “language appropriateness”, “language legitimacy”, and “academic language.” Consequently, it reveals the complex ways these discourses on language normativity shape the experiences of migrantised students in postcolonial contexts. While mainstream accounts often depict globalised higher education as a borderless and multilingual environment, these dynamics reveal the persistence of ordinary raciolinguistic bordering practices that shape who counts as an “academic subject” and what can be legitimised as “knowledge.” Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal work, Borderlands/La Frontera, offers a compelling multilingual articulation of the border as a site of situated decolonial knowledge. Crucially, its literary and multilingual form is itself epistemic, enacting modes of knowing that exceed and unsettle dominant academic conventions; in doing so, it destabilises the distinction between literary expression and academic knowledge production. Against this backdrop, the present literature review examines the main thematic and conceptual debates investigating the interplay between language, racialisation processes, and the border within the context of international higher education. By identifying and synthesising prevailing frameworks, this review highlights how language ideologies and racial formations intersect to regulate belonging and exclusion in higher education. Furthermore, it points to how creative multilingual practices can be used as a mode of resistance, shifting paradigms from bordering practices to the "borderland" as a site of knowledge. The analysis advances understanding of the mechanisms underlying these dynamics and suggests directions for future research that integrate perspectives on bordering, raciolinguistics, as well as modes of resistance through creative multilingualism.

This research was funded by FCT (PhD Studentship 2024.03389.BD). The presentation was supported by COST Action [CA24137] (-COST-GRANT-CA24137-777af14a) & EduSocial Travel Grant.