Conference Agenda

How can education respond constructively to minoritized students’ experiences? As we know from international research, students’ racial-ethnic classed and gendered experiences (feelings, moods and practices that occur due to one’s minority positioning), and educators’ ways of dealing with them, are pertinent factors in educational institutions and critical diversity pedagogies (Zembylas & McGlynn 2012; Zembylas, 2015). We also know that diversity work which creates inclusive environments that are accepting of differences and provide equal opportunities has a profound effect on learning outcomes, motivation and well-being among students, in particular minority students. Since racial-ethnic and intersectional experiences play such a decisive role, there is an urgent need to develop pedagogies that address these experiences in constructive ways (Vertelyte & Staunæs, 2022).

Based on the argument that diversity work is also ‘mood work’ (Ahmed, 2014), the symposium focuses on the collective atmospheres and individual feelings, that channel and circumscribe the processes through which racial-ethnic and gendered experiences become invested. These moods emerge for instance, when students encounter and negotiate racially charged humour as funny or offensive; when white teachers or majority students are confused and hurt by being called racist by other students; when being a minority student ‘feels like being a problem’ (Du Bois, 1903/2019); or when minority students’ experiences of racial and ethnic exclusion are met with skepticism. Considering that diversity work is often mood work and felt differently by differently positioned people (Ahmed, 2014), and generations of people, in this symposium we draw on new feminist materialisms (Barad 2010) and affects studies (Ahmed 2014; Wetherell 2012) and address how exactly racialized, classed and gendered moods are formed as part of educational encounters and how they are dealt with by students and educators (Petersen & Millei, 2016; Reay 2013; Staunæs & Juelskjær 2016; Walkerdine 2021; Zembylas 2015).

In this symposium, we aim to explore how emotions and collective moods shape and constitute diversity work across different educational and national contexts: higher education in Australia, kindergarten teacher education and high schools in Norway, and high schools in Denmark. The papers deal with affective issues relevant to questions of inclusion and intersectional forms of diversity in educational settings. In the symposium, we explore how the vocabulary of everyday diversity work may take affective generational shapes and how different generations have varied ways of comprehending and approaching their common day language around diversity (Paper 1: Staunæs and Vertelyte); how the silence on issues of social class in diversity and equity policy shape the feelings of belonging in the academia of early career researchers in Australian universities (Paper 2: Maree Martinussen); how racialized moods in Norwegian kindergarten teacher education may transform and shape critical approaches to pedagogies (Paper 3: Camilla Eline Andersen and Agnes Westgaard Bjelkerud); and how staff at Norwegian schools negotiate understandings of racism and coordinate practices on and against it (Paper 4: Christine Lillethun Norheim and Rebecca W. B. Lund). Putting the four papers in conversation, we aim to discuss what is common and different when we look at diversity work as mood work across different educational contexts of European/Nordic welfare states, as the perspectives from Australian contexts allow us to discuss what is distinctively European or Nordic. This discussion is brought further by the discussant Zsuzsanna Millei, who’s research includes both Nordic and Australian contexts. Moreover, we aim to discuss how different moods are constituted in relation to different diversity categories (such as social class, race, ethnicity, gender) and across different national educational contexts; and finally what are the methodological ways to explore diversity work as exactly mood work.

Since at least the Danish cartoon crisis, which highlighted racialization and anti-Muslimism sentiments in Denmark (Hervik, 2011) as well as the international #MeeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, there has been intensified debates about what words and images are possible to use in relation to issues of diversity. The language (words, phrases, terms, discursive connotations) used around issues of diversity has become a matter of not only wording but wor(l)ding diversity (Haraway, 2016). Such ‘wor(l)ding-debates’ not only reflect the power struggles and tensions of minority-majority, racialization, or sexual harassment. They also materialize generational tensions and differences between (grand) parents and their (grand) children, educators, and students. During ethnographic research at two Danish gymnasiums, we encountered words used by students and teachers around diversity issues that are affectively charged. They bring forth discomfort, embarrassment, feelings of righteousness, and aspirations for change. While students wor(l)ded diversity in a more straight forward, easy-going manner, the educators ‘ran out of words’, stumbled, and expressed discomfort about the vocabulary available in relation to issues of gender, cultural, racial, and sexual diversity. We examine how the language of everyday diversity work takes generational shapes and how different generations have varied ways of approaching their common day language around diversity. The object of our analysis is not only words, phrases, and terms, but the atmospheric tensions around these wor(l)dings. This makes us wonder how diversity is affectively performed through wording and gestures; and through what may be termed, ‘nice’ pedagogical language versus the ‘dark language’ where the cut-of-words, like the N-word and even ‘race’, is haunting the conversations and creating tense ambiances (Ladson-Billing 1998; Gordon 2008). To embark on how generational differences around the diversity vocabulary come into tensions we deploy analytical concepts from feminist new materialism (Barad, 2010; Bennet, 2010; Chen, 2012) and affect studies (Ahmed, 2014) that emphasize the affective entanglement of words and worlding (Haraway 2011). Approaching diversity work as mood work (Ahmed, 2014) we go beyond content and discourse analysis. Instead, we work with a performative cartography (Staunæs & Mengel 2023): First, this involves ethnographic observations and 20 interviews with students and educators. Second, a computer-animated visualization of highlights and absences of diversity words used in the interview material; and finally, two online learning labs involving 10 students and educators, where using these visual interfaces facilitated reflections upon diversity work, language, and intergenerational moods.

Ahmed, S. (2014). Not in The Mood. New Formations, 82, 13-28. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and Hauntological Relations. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240- 268. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matters. A political ecology of things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies. Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kinship in the Chtulucene. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2011). Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture's Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country, Australian Humanities Review. Hervik, P. (2011). The Annoying Difference: The Emergence of Danish Nationalism, Neoracism, and Populism in the Post-1989 World. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what's it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7-24. Staunæs, D. & P. Mengel (2023 in press). Performative Cartography. Re-animating the archive. In Jackson, A. & L. Mazzei (eds.). Postfoundational approaches to inquiry. Routledge

Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives often constitute large and firmly instituted workplans within universities globally, particularly in the ‘West’ (Ahmed, 2012). However, the discrimination and sense of exclusion working-class students and staff face as a result of classism and elitism are rarely discussed and confronted explicitly (Walkerdine, 2021). Issues of class are often subsumed within a ‘widening participation agenda’ informed by the neoliberal assumptions of social mobility. But as Reay notes, a widening participation agenda that is adequately based on social justice concerns ‘requires much more than the movement of a few individuals up and down an increasingly inequitable social system’ (Reay, 2013, p. 661). In this paper, I use a psychosocial affective-discursive approach (Wetherell, 2012) to explore the relative silence on issues of social class in diversity and equity policy making, and its impacts in the everyday, particularly with regards to feelings of belonging in the academe. How and from where do feelings of being ‘out of place’ emerge, and in conjunction with what affective, classed ideologies? Using narratives of students and early career researchers enrolled in postgraduate studies in Australia, accumulated and embodied knowledges of classed personhood are examined. Data are drawn from repeat, biographical interviews, produced with participants identifying as women from working-class or low-socioeconomic backgrounds. I explore subjective, embodied and experiential aspects of ‘doing class’, outlining some of the barriers that participants face in gaining a sense of belonging at university. As a result of subtle and unintended forms of classism, I show how participants feel compelled to hide their working-classness, and experience a sense of loss at being mis-classed. I advance an agenda for greater inclusion of issues of classism—both overt and subtle—in university equity, diversity and inclusion work, applicable to a wide range of country contexts.

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press. Reay, D. (2013). Social mobility, a panacea for austere times: tales of emperors, frogs, and tadpoles. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34(5–6), 660–677. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2013.816035 Walkerdine, V. (2021). What’s class got to do with it? Discourse, 42(1), 60–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2020.1767939 Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. Sage Publications.

The Norwegian kindergarten teacher education shall prepare students to perform the teacher profession in a society characterized by diversity. Moreover, in kindergartens the staff shall give all children the same opportunities while also working against discrimination, prejudices, stereotypes, and racism. Previous research in the Norwegian context has shown that race is silenced in the field of early childhood education, also in kindergarten teacher education (Andersen, 2015). Dowling (2017) found that Norwegian teacher educators express a lack of knowledge and conceptual language for addressing race and racism, and that they by this are contributing to upholding white privilege in their teaching. However, she suggests that changes in teaching practices will not be sufficient if white teacher educators only become conscious about how they take part in “race relations” in teacher education. This project evolves from a long-term stuttering of two white teacher educators with majority backgrounds in a Norwegian context. Individually, when teaching on issues of race, racism and racializaton in a kindergarten teacher education programme, and during and after race-events in the classroom, in the hall, and in our offices. And collectively, when sharing feelings of failure, discomfort, stuckness, but also a bodily drive to continue to explore ways to put race, racism, and racialization on the agenda in the kindergarten teacher education programme. To go beyond being conscious of how we as white teacher take part in “race relations” and to transform our pedagogy as teacher educators, we explore what else might happen if we turn to ‘mood work’ (Ahmed, 2014). We are particularly interested in how racialized moods sensed by us as educators are formed, in the classroom and in teaching, understood as ‘feelings that are not our own’ (Ahmed, 2014, p, 15). And how to work with these to transform our pedagogy to create more socially just educational spaces.

Ahmed, S. (2014). Not in the Mood. New Formations, 82, 13–28. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.82.01.2014 Andersen, C. E. (2015). Mot en mindre profesjonalitet: Rase, tidlig barndom og Deleuzeoguattariske blivelser [PhD, Stockholms universitet, Samhällsvetenskapliga fakulteten, Barn- och ungdomsvetenskapliga institutionen]. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A795293&dswid=-7916 Dowling, F. (2017). «’Rase’ og etnisitet? Det kan ikke jeg si noe særlig om – her er det ’Blenda-hvitt’!». Norsk Pedagogisk Tidsskrift, 101(3), 252–265. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1504-2987-2017-03-06

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, and particularly those of the spring of 2020, increased attention has been afforded to racism in its diverse forms and at different levels in Norwegian society. Researchers and public intellectuals have paid particular attention to structural, institutional, and everyday forms of racism (Orupabo, 2021; 2022; VG, 2021). This shift in public discourse has impacted educational settings, and puts pressure on school leaders and staff to develop systematic strategies on diversity, inclusion and ensuring a racism-free environment. Research indicates that taking these problems seriously in school contexts is particularly important because schools are the arenas where children and youth experience the most racism (Norwegian Centre Against for Racism 2017; UNICEF 2022). While there is a growing body of research in Norway on racism on a societal level and in specific institutions such as schools, focus has tended to be placed on how racism is discussed in classrooms, or students’ and teachers’ perceptions of racism (Svendsen, 2014; Myrebøe, 2021). Less attention has been directed towards how staff at Norwegian schools negotiate understandings of racism and coordinate practices on and against it. Moreover, less attention has been paid to how the student-centered services, who have responsibilities for ensuring students’ psychosocial well-being, engage in such work. This paper contributes with insights on how such staff engage in the institutional, discursive and emotional labor of: (1) identifying that the psychosocial environment is lacking, particularly for students with migrant backgrounds (2) develop strategies for coordinating a response to these lacks (3) tackle challenges and resistance they encounter towards coordinated and systematic efforts throughout institutional levels for an inclusive school environment. Drawing on data material produced by the first author as part of a prolonged field study in connection with her doctoral research, the analysis starts from following counselor experiences. Moving from this, the authors map the relations this counselor engages into further inclusion and to protect and enhance valuation of diversity: this includes the work of documenting student experiences of racism and of presenting these to school leaders with the purpose of taking coordinated action. In this work counselors invest considerable emotional labor (Hochschild 1983) in navigating diverging social moods (Ahmed 2014) and discourses on racism in ways that are constructive to their goals.

Myrebøe, T. (2021). Nedsettende – og innafor? Læreres erfaringer med elevers bruk av stereotypier og fordomsuttrykk i klasserommet. Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk & kritikk, 7, 210–223. https://doi.org/10.23865/ntpk.v7.2141 Norwegian Centre Against Racism. (2017). Vi vil ikke leke med deg fordi du er brun – En undersøkelse av opplevd rasisme blant ungdom. https://antirasistisk.no/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Vi-vil-ikke-leke-med-deg-fordi-du-er-brun-en-unders%C3%B8kelse-av-opplevd-rasisme-blant-ungdom.pdf Orupabo, J. (2021). Spranget fra hvem som er rasist, til når, hvor og hvordan. Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning 62(01), 116-120. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1504-291X-2021-01-10 Orupabo, J., Vassenden, A. & Handulle, A. (2022). Å redde hvite folks ansikt: ritualer og makt i rasialiserte situasjoner. In Cora Alexa Døving (Ed.) Rasisme – Fenomenet, forskningen, erfaringene. Universitetsforlaget. Svendsen, S. H. B. (2014). Learning racism in the absence of «race», European Journal of Women’s Studies, 21(1), 9–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506813507717 United Nations Children’s Fund, (UNICEF). (2022). U-report Norge: Hva mener barn og unge om rasisme? U-report 2022. https://www.unicef.no/sites/default/files/inlineimages/daCZWFxQ9vRhloYsE4Z7E1ogIr9cybeHeLpo1sQXNXo2SnFJIq.pdf VG. (2021). Hverdagsrasisme.