In this talk, we outline the basics of Rahel Jaeggi’s examination of Alienation, which she defines as the “absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others” (2016). Jaeggi’s work is situated in the tradition of critical social theory, based on a revision of Hegelian-Marxist philosophies. These ideas will be familiar to anyone who has ever felt estranged from their own life, anyone who has wrestled with a sense of indifference, isolation or meaninglessness. We argue that these issues are of heightened relevance to foreign language teachers now in the aftermath of the global pandemic, which highlighted the precarity of international borders and redefined many of our social interactions. In particular, as foreign teachers working in Japan, we explore some of the issues that have led to feelings of alienation in our own experiences. In this talk, we will outline the types of research that could shed further light onto this issue, (such as autoethnography, introspective techniques, reflective practice) and describe a forthcoming project which is designed to examine the concept of alienation first-hand from the perspective of foreign teachers living and working in Japan.