Belated belonging in silence and care: emotional geographies of Indian students in English-medium medical education in Vietnam

Purpose This paper aims to examine how emotional geographies shape international medical students’ experiences of English-medium instruction (EMI) in Vietnam within a South–South mobility context. It focuses on how affective atmospheres, temporal trajectories and everyday forms of mediation condition belonging, participation and care across classrooms, clinical wards, dormitories and city spaces. Design/methodology/approach This study draws on semi-structured narrative interviews with 16 Indian medical students enrolled in an EMI medical program in Vietnam. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic narrative analysis, attending to how affective experiences were patterned across space and time and how students narrated moments of silence, vulnerability, recognition and peer support. Findings Findings show that EMI medical training was experienced through affectively differentiated spaces rather than a uniform learning environment. Classroom silence and formality initially produced estrangement, while clinical settings intensified affective risk through public exposure of language and competence. Over time, students developed strategies of adjustment that contained discomfort without fully resolving it. Belonging often emerged belatedly through small recognitions – peer mediation, patient interactions and everyday linguistic gestures – leaving affective residues that continued to shape learning and care practices. Originality/value The study conceptualizes clinical EMI as an affective infrastructure through which emotions circulate, accumulate and unevenly shape participation and belonging. It introduces ambient estrangement to capture low-intensity atmospheres of misrecognition and affective brokerage to theorize peer-mediated labor that enables participation without confronting institutional hierarchy. By foregrounding affect, the paper extends EMI and student mobility research beyond linguistic and cognitive framings, offering a relational account of professional becoming in South–South medical education.