Becoming a Published Scholar: Indonesian EFL Teacher Educators Negotiating Feedback, Identity, and Recognition

While existing research often highlights the struggles of early-career academics, less attention is paid to how experienced scholars in peripheral contexts navigate the peer review process. This study explores the challenges Indonesian EFL faculty face when responding to reviewer feedback and the strategies they use to navigate these challenges. Guided by academic literacy theory, the study employed a qualitative case study with three female teacher educators and one male teacher educator from four different Indonesian universities. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings reveal two key insights: (1) participants faced persistent challenges spanning temporal, epistemic, social, and institutional dimensions including difficulty balancing revision with competing academic, familial, and doctoral responsibilities, impediments in interpreting ambiguous reviewer feedback, limited collegial collaboration, restricted access to quality references, inadequate publication funding, and infrequent professional development opportunities; and (2) they employed a diverse repertoire of adaptive strategies encompassing self-regulation and task prioritization, peer consultation, cultivation of supportive research environments, mobilization of alternative resources, pursuit of available funding and rewards, and engagement with external mentoring and training programs reflecting a determined scholarly agency that largely compensated for the insufficiencies of formal institutional support. These findings challenge individualistic accounts of academic publishing and highlight the importance of recognizing the structural and contextual conditions that shape scholarly participation in the Global South. The study concludes that more equitable academic infrastructures, sustained mentoring, accessible professional development, and institutional support are needed to enable Indonesian EFL teacher educators and other scholars in peripheral contexts to participate more confidently and sustainably in international knowledge production. Keywords: identity, published scholar, reviewers’ feedback, research publication.