Background: Culturally and Racially Marginalised (CaRM) communities in Australia encounter subtle and covert forms of prejudice, commonly referred to as “new racism”. Within healthcare settings, these experiences can shape trust, engagement, and patterns of help-seeking. Mental health nurses are often the first point of contact in care delivery, and their ability to recognise, respond to, and mitigate the impacts of new racism is critical for fostering therapeutic relationships and supporting equitable access. Understanding how CaRM communities perceive the conditions that influence their mental health service use is fundamental for informing more equitable and culturally responsive care. Objective: This study explored the viewpoints of CaRM community members regarding the factors they consider important for addressing new racism in healthcare systems and supporting engagement with mental health services. Design: Q methodology was used to identify statistically derived viewpoints that reflect shared viewpoints about the conditions perceived as critical for addressing the impacts of new racism on mental health service use. Setting: Participants were recruited from culturally and linguistically diverse communities across Australia through community settings, social media, and professional networks. Participants: Thirty-five individuals from CaRM backgrounds completed the Q-sort. Methods: This Q methodology consisted of five steps: (1) set up of the Q-sorting instrument, (2) selection of participants, (3) data collection, (4) factor analysis, and (5) factor interpretation. Results: Three distinct viewpoints were identified: (1) raising awareness of mental health issues within CaRM communities (community-focused), (2) providing visible anti-racism and culturally safe services (service-focused), and (3) recognising and formally addressing new racism within healthcare systems (policy-focused). Conclusions: This study offers the first empirically derived, community-informed set of viewpoints on addressing new racism in Australian mental healthcare. While exploratory, the findings highlight multi-level considerations that are potentially relevant to mental health nursing practice, and may be useful to inform future research, policy development, and service redesign aimed at strengthening cultural responsiveness and equity in mental health systems.

Background: Australia’s increasingly multicultural landscape has seen a rise in culturally and linguistically diverse populations, many of whom face subtle and systemic forms of discrimination known as “new racism”. Objective: Underpinned by a person-centred and holistic framework, which recognises individuals as experts in their own lived experiences and emphasises strength-based, culturally situated understandings of well-being, this paper reports on a study that explores how culturally and racially marginalised diverse people in Australia cope with the mental health impacts of new racism. Design: A qualitative descriptive approach was employed in this study. Participants: Thirty participants from ten culturally and linguistically diverse communities participated in eight focus groups, providing rich insights into their lived experiences. Methods: Data were collected through semi-structured focus-group interviews conducted between March and June 2025. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke’ method of thematic analysis. Results: Thematic analysis revealed four key coping strategies: (1) acceptance of immutable identity traits to foster resilience, (2) emotional ventilation within culturally safe spaces, (3) self-growth and empowerment through reflection and adaptive practices, and (4) assertive responses to racism when necessary. While some participants reported psychological distress, many demonstrated resilience and resourcefulness, challenging deficit-based assumptions often found in the existing literature. Findings underscore the importance of culturally responsive mental healthcare, including peer support, emotional safe spaces, and strength-based interventions. Conclusions: This study offers a holistic understanding of how culturally and racially marginalised people cope with new racism and its mental health impacts. The findings highlight the critical need for person-centred, culturally responsive, and equity-focused mental health support, providing actionable guidance for nursing practice and policy development.

ABSTRACT The global demand for higher education has resulted in government imperatives and policies aimed to increase student participation from under-represented groups, such as those who reside outside urban areas and from low socio-economic backgrounds. In Australia, the recent Universities Accord report (2024) signals achieving a larger, fairer higher education system with broadening of access. Thus, it is timely to examine the mechanisms that may have an impact on broadening participation in higher education for under-represented groups. One aspect of this is admission pathways and how they might contribute to greater inclusivity. Implications for how differing admission pathways are managed and their impact on student achievement levels are a likely consideration for universities. This paper reports on this under-researched area through analyses of large-volume data from one university over 5 years to ascertain undergraduate achievement at course completion according to admission pathways. The data show that non-traditional admission cohorts follow national trends of growth as a proportion of admissions. Results revealed that diversifying admission pathways has little impact on these students’ achievements at course completion and as such may be an important strategy in achieving greater equity in higher education. However, demographic data signalled that students from higher socio-economic areas course achievement were higher than their low- and middle-area peers. Interestingly, students from regional locations outperformed their urban peers and study mode did not impact achievement. These results are significant in that they contribute to discussions of advancing higher education participation for under-represented groups.

AI potential to recolonise language practices by reproducing existing marginalisations in novel ways has already instilled fears of a ‘contemporary dystopia’ (Miras et al., 2022) — a space of cultural and linguistic erasure. Accents represent a distinctive aspect of language practice associated with one’s sociocultural, and ethno-racial characteristics. They account for one’s social identity, status, and proficiency (De Klerk & Bosch, 1995). This makes practices of artificially modifying accents particularly concerning, since they play into the ‘zero’ accent ideology. As a result, any deviation from the norm is marked as abnormal or deficient, and in need of, artificial correction. Using AI accent generators, therefore, has the capacity to further aggravate power inequalities between the linguistically privileged and underprivileged, and to encourage changes in self-representation towards what is perceived as the normative Standard. Artificial modification of self to match a desired representation is not new, given the long-standing discussions on digital image alterations and their negative relationships to self-perceived attractiveness (Ozimek et al., 2023). This conceptual paper explores the (re)colonial and subversive linguistic potential of AI accent generators through the lens of the social tendency of individuals to strive to meet a given Standard. Using the notion of ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988), we draw a parallel between self-perceived attractiveness of bodies and accents, to explain how artificial modifications do not straightforwardly support diversities, but instead encourage ‘self-corrections’ in line with those standardized sets of features which seem to promise a ‘better’ socioeconomic and educational standing within neoliberal societies.

Abstract International education is Australia’s largest services export, and third largest export altogether, generating between $22 billion and $40 billion per year over the last few years. Higher education represents half of this ‘market’ with over 25 % of students being from overseas. Despite the important role that international students play in the fabric of Australian society and specifically in higher education, the findings from our linguistic ethnographic study of international students at an Australian university showed that the English language learning needs of these students were frequently unmet. Using James Scott’s theory of official and hidden transcripts, we reveal that students reported feeling that their “English is not good enough” and assumed personal ‘(ir)responsibility’ for this outcome. In this broad English Medium Instruction (EMI) context, where English is not the first language, but it is used as the language of instruction and as the lingua franca amongst international students, English-dominant perspectives acted to marginalise international students, impacting their academic performance and confidence for social networking. In this paper, we describe the shifts in higher educational policy in Australia over the last few decades to provide context to the current neoliberal educational climate for international students. We draw on principles of social justice to examine the present-day system and argue that Australian universities need to shift from an EMI by default model to a genuine EMI offering.

With a focus on Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD) women, this article will discuss the underlying gender inequalities and stereotypes these women experience in Australian tertiary institutions through reflections of translingual discrimination. Translingual discrimination refers to the ideologies and practices that produce unequal linguistic power relationships between CaLD communities and dominant communities of the host society, focusing on the central role that language plays in the enduring relevance of discrimination disparity. Because of CaLD women's translingual identities, these groups experience such aspects of translingual discrimination as accentism, naming practices, linguistic subordination, deskilling, and stereotyping, which eventually affect their well‐being and economic security. CaLD women need a linguistically and culturally “safe space” where they will be supported and appreciated based on their capabilities and skills and not subjected to objectification, femininity evaluations, and derogatory actions. Opportunities for women should persist because, unfortunately, in men‐dominated fields, these opportunities are still necessary to support and include women.

Abstract Drawing on ethnographic interview analysis of Aboriginal participants in Australia, this study seeks to expand the critical discussions in Applied Linguistics by understanding the concept of translanguaging in relation to its “mundanity” (or ordinariness). Our data shows that rather than perceiving translanguaging as extraordinary, for Aboriginal speakers it is more likely to be considered normal, unremarkable, mundane, and as a long-existing phenomenon. The concept of the mundanity of translanguaging is thereby expanded through three main discussions in this article: 1) negotiating identity and resisting racism, where the Aboriginal speakers choose to translanguage using their full linguistic repertoires, but with appropriate communicative adjustments made for their interlocutor; 2) a display of respect towards their land, heritage and language; and 3) as an inherent and mundane everyday practice where they constantly negotiate between heritage languages, English, Kriol, and Aboriginal English varieties. The significance of this study lies in the normalisation of translanguaging as a mundane disinvention strategy, as this urges us to perceive linguistic separateness as a colonial ideological construct that is used to exhibit control over diverse peoples and to maintain uniformity and stability of nation-states.