This paper, drawing from a post-structuralist ontological and epistemological framework of reference and from a post-qualitative methodological approach, investigates language teachers’ personal and professional life trajectories within the context of UK Higher Education. The teachers who took part in this study come from a variety of cultural, linguistic and academic backgrounds and deal with notions of diversity, inequality and minority within and outside the academic discourses. Their stories of professionalization are very divergent and give evidence of nomadic and diasporic journeys into becoming language educators. Starting from one story about language teaching as re-negotiation of identity, this paper presents powerful auto/biographical narratives of activism and of displacements. These are narratives of struggle and of resilience, but also of hope and joy. They are stories of a passion for teaching, for language learning, for sharing knowledge and also for freedom and independence through education. Drawing from a post-qualitative methodological approach (Lather 2013; Lather & St.Pierre 2013, St.Pierre et al. 2016) grounded on New Materialism (Bennett 2010) and Posthumanism (Braidotti 2011, 2013), the study makes use of verbal and visual narratives, of poems, of objects and of artefacts to give voice to language teachers’ nomadic professional identity. The variety of semiotic fields of representations enables the researcher to portray the fluid, rhizomatic and non-linear identity of language teachers (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) who navigate between unstable professional domains and move in between different physical and symbolic territories. The paper also explores a position of conducting research differently (Hollway & Jefferson 2013) by actively engaging the participants as co-researchers within the study and by reflecting on the transformative journey the research process represents for both participants and researcher. It also considers the impact academic writing has on the self and on others (Richardson & St.Pierre 2005). The findings of this study highlight the powerful, yet invisible and marginal, stories of language teachers’ journeys into professionalization embodied through diasporic and nomadic displacements of the professional self. The study hopes to inspire language teachers to embark into new professional trajectories and also aims at underpinning a different conceptual and practical attitude to language teacher training and professional development that would position identity at the core of its framework.

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