Conference Agenda

Higher education institutions face the critical challenge of preparing their graduates to work and live in intercultural and superdiverse environments. To help graduates understand and ultimately challenge inequities in society, this preparation entails fostering critical consciousness (understanding structural inequities), critical motivation (a sense of responsibility to address them), and critical action intentions (the willingness to take informed action to challenge social injustice) among students (Diemer et al., 2022). Yet, teachers working in higher education often lack the time, resources, and institutional support to create learning environments that support students in developing critical consciousness and action, and may be insecure to extensively and critically discuss topics surrounding diversity and inequities (Hölscher et al., 2024). In this study, we therefore present and evaluate an innovative intervention which uses podcasting as a tool to cultivate critical consciousness and action among social sciences students.

Informed by cultural literacy pedagogies for higher education (García Ochoa et al., 2016; García Ochoa & McDonald, 2019), our podcasting intervention employs a strategy that aims to firstly invoke destabilisation (discomfort) within students, which is then followed by structured reflection exercises. This destabilisation is necessary to develop critical consciousness by creating a “rupture in knowing” that forces students to confront their own biases and discomfort with cultural differences . Through guided reflection, this discomfort is turned into learning by giving students tools to understand and interpret unfamiliar cultural situations. Together, these processes help students move beyond “passive ignorance” toward a more active and reflective understanding of cultural difference.

We translated the cultural literacy framework principles of destabilization and reflection in an adapted version of the (Re)Searching Identity Podcast intervention (Vietze et al., 2025), aimed to enhance critical consciousness, motivation, and action, by making use of three distinct phases (Vietze et al., 2025). Firstly, students listen to and reflect on recorded podcast episodes. In each episode, one scientist or professional is interviewed about their experiences at work and in academia and how these experiences may have been shaped by their own culture, ethnicity, or race. Secondly, students use established interviewing techniques to co-create and record their own podcast episodes, thereby actively engaging with minoritized and marginalized stories and experiences of a scientist or professional of their choice. Thirdly, students and their teacher reflect on the complexity and heterogeneity of experiences encountered in the podcast episodes and relate them to societal and educational issues of marginalization.

Against this background, our study aims to evaluate the podcasting intervention both as a tool and as an application of critical/cultural literacy pedagogy in higher education with the goal to foster students’ critical consciousness and action. Specifically, the study examines whether and under which conditions the intervention supports the development of students’ critical consciousness and action (RQ1), and how students and teachers experience the instruction, implementation, and underlying critical literacy approach of the podcast intervention (RQ2).

Across Europe, the massification and expansion of higher education have strengthened expectations that education functions as a pathway to upward social mobility for marginalized students (Padilla et al., 2022). This dynamic is evident in Hungary, where participation in tertiary education has continued to rise despite demographic decline, increasing pressure on higher education institutions to respond to growing social and cultural diversity (Híves & Kozma, 2025). As a result, transforming universities into more inclusive environments has become a central concern for policy and research (Casey, 2016). Within this context, inclusion-oriented frameworks, like the Inclusive Excellence (IE) movement, have gained prominence by framing diversity as an institutional asset capable of enhancing educational quality and student success when supported by organizational practices (Milem et al., 2005). Despite these developments, educational expansion has not produced equal opportunities across student groups.

Across Europe, members of Roma groups are consistently identified as the most underrepresented in higher education, with only 1–4 percent attaining tertiary qualifications (Frazer-Marlier, 2011). These enduring disparities expose the limits of expansion and underscore the need for targeted initiatives addressing the barriers Roma students face in accessing, navigating, and succeeding in higher education. In response, support mechanisms for Roma students have emerged across Europe. In countries such as Spain and Serbia, these initiatives have largely developed through bottom-up efforts led by civil society, while in contexts including the United Kingdom, Portugal, and increasingly Hungary, support has been shaped by national governments or local authorities (Bhabha et al., 2018; Calado et al., 2019; Danvers & Hinton-Smith, 2022; Hensby et al., 2024). These approaches reflect a growing European recognition that meaningful inclusion requires institutionalized support extending beyond formal academic provision.

The paper examines Roma student societies in Hungary as inclusive, non-formal micro-communities operating alongside universities (Rogers, 2014, p. 15). Although embedded within a specific national regulatory framework (Government Decree No. 24/2013 (II. 5.), these institutions address challenges common across European higher education systems, including the underrepresentation of first-generation, socioeconomically disadvantaged, and racialized minority students (Bhabha et al., 2018; Calado et al., 2019; Simić & Vranješević, 2019; Danvers & Hinton-Smith, 2022; Hensby et al., 2024). The Hungarian case is therefore situated within broader European debates on widening participation, inclusive excellence, and intercultural approaches to higher education (Casey, 2016; Gallego-Noche & Goenechea-Permisán, 2022). The analysis draws on a theoretical framework integrating the Inclusive Excellence movement (Milem et al., 2005), non-formal learning theory (Rogers, 2014), and interculturality, informed by sociological and educational research on minority students’ social mobility. Inclusive Excellence conceptualizes diversity as an institutional resource enhancing student engagement and success when embedded in organizational practice, while research on non-formal learning highlights flexible yet pedagogically structured environments characterized by experiential learning, horizontal relationships, and individualized engagement that bridge formal education and students’ lived experiences (Rogers, 2014; Hawley-Woodall, 2019).

In this theoretical framework this paper addresses the overarching research question: How do Roma student communities enhance social inclusion within higher education? Three interrelated questions guide the analysis: how members of Roma student societies conceptualize a “cooperative community”; how Roma students experience personalized support while navigating social disadvantage and upward mobility; and how elements of the “Roma intellectual” identity emerge within both university settings and Roma student societies. These questions are examined within the intercultural environment of Roma student societies and the wider university context.

This paper examines how majority- and minority-ethnic high school students’ search for “similar” peers drives social and ethnic micro-segregation within the apparently egalitarian Danish school system. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a diverse Copenhagen high school, it traces how the participating students searched for and recognized, but also crafted and enacted “similarity” in their social interactions. It argues that the students’ tendency to form friendships with what they regard as ‘similar’ others was partly guided by the political and cultural marking of certain categories, a tacit ethno-racialized divide that limits their social orientation, as well as the distinctions of class, gender and youth subcultures made relevant in the social context of the high school. At the same time, similarities were also created through interaction, guided by the students’ desire for recognition, safety, and social appeal, thereby reinforcing segregation. Importantly, while such segregation is often framed in Danish debates as a problem of “self-segregation” among minority-ethnic students, majority-ethnic youth showed a similar tendency to cluster together. At the same time, these youth also split into groups seemingly reflecting subtle social class differences that reinforced social segregation in less visible ways.

In much research, including the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu, segregation is explained through ‘homophily’ - the tendency for people to interact with those perceived as similar (Bourdieu 1990; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). While social, ethnic, cultural, and religious differences do exist due distinct social, political and historical conditions, and while socio-economic inequality and racial discrimination generate real disparities in life chances, this paper questions the widespread assumption that social classes, ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’, or categories such as ‘white’ and ‘black’ or ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘majority’ are internally homogeneous and fundamentally different from one another. Instead, it argues for an interactional and processual approach to similarity and difference. Drawing on Barth (1969, 1994), Bottero (2009), Lamont and Molnár (2002), Gullestad (1992, 2002), and Ahmed (2006, 2014), the paper highlights how similarity and difference in the high school context are also produced through political markings of categories, processes of cultural distinctions, orientation in social encounters, young people’s needs for belonging and recognition and not least mutual adjustments in everyday interactions.