Conscientization under Constraint: Employment Relations and Critical Language-Policy Agency in Bangladeshi Private Universities

Abstract Critical language policy (CLP) research has documented how teachers interpret, appropriate, and contest institutional language policy, and recent work has begun specifying the conditions under which transformative agency is mobilised. Largely unexamined is how employment relations condition two linked steps: whether teachers can build a structural reading of policy, and whether any such reading can be publicly expressed and collectively organised. I address that gap through a cross-sectional study of fourteen English-language teachers at seven Bangladeshi private universities, drawing on adapted biographical-narrative interviews, reflective journals, critical-incident narratives, and critical discourse analysis of institutional artefacts. Freire's critical consciousness describes interpretive discourse; Archer's morphogenetic approach orders retrospectively narrated sequences. Three recurrent configurations emerge, in which employment relation, educational biography, site, seniority, and scholarly access are entangled. Sustained structural-ideological interpretation appeared only among permanently employed Bangla-medium teachers with eight or more years' experience and access to collegial scholarly space; incipient structural questioning was widespread among contractually employed Bangla-medium and madrasa-formed teachers but was withheld from public expression; and the single participant-reported instance of codified policy change followed collective organisation rather than individual critique. The article proposes the conscientized-but-constrained position, a structural reading whose institutional expression is foreclosed, as a new analytic category.