In this paper, we focus on speakers of languages other than English to explore the impact of English medium of instruction (EMI) on the internationalisation of higher education in Kazakhstan. As postcolonial scholars of colour, we acknowledge that our historical and colonial legacies shape our positionality, epistemologies and worldviews, leading to our interest in Bourdieu's field, habitus and capital. We illustrate how EMI reconfigures the field and establishes winners and losers based on their linguistic proficiency, pedagogical habitus and capital mismatches. We argue that Bourdieu can contribute to a new narrative to counter current research foregrounding EMI solely as a linguistic challenge leading to 1) misrecognition when local perspectives, habitus and capital of local professors are silenced and 2) symbolic violence when dominant English values and norms are enforced, reproducing local and global inequalities and power imbalances. We conclude that without habitus and capital engagement in Kazakhstan, professional development will be ineffective in restructuring the habitus of professors formed during their primary, secondary and tertiary education in their native language that gave them pedagogical authority as knowledgeable conveyors of both the language and the educational system that formed them; operating as a structuring structure in the reconfigured higher education field.