Conference Agenda

In increasingly diverse educational contexts, identity has emerged as a key construct for understanding how individuals negotiate belonging, recognition, and participation in schooling. While education acts as a domain for social and cultural transformation, it can simultaneously function as a site where religious boundaries give rise to both personal and structural forms of discrimination. This study focuses on the case of Türkiye, where religious diversity is recognized only to a limited extent within the constitutional framework, and where the compulsory Religious Culture and Ethics Knowledge (RCEK) course continues to be a subject of debate regarding freedom of religion and conscience.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how individuals in Türkiye who hold diverse religious and cultural identities construct meanings around their schooling experiences, how these meanings are historically and socially situated, and how they are reproduced through everyday school practices. Specifically, the research examines the schooling experiences of individuals educated in Mardin, a historically multicultural city, to understand how everyday encounters either reproduce religion-based discrimination or foster a multicultural culture of harmony.

The study addresses the following research questions: How do individuals from different religious and cultural backgrounds construct their schooling experiences? In what ways do narratives make visible experiences of discrimination, othering, and adaptation? How are institutional practices perceived by Christian students?.

Findings revealed two overarching themes: "Discrimination" and "Construction of Harmony within the School". Under the theme of Discrimination, participants described social exclusion in peer relations, religious pressure, othering, and the concealment of discrimination. The compulsory RCEK course emerged as a symbolic site where Christian students’ difference became visible and their identity was problematized, often leading to feelings of exclusion. Participants noted that while overt hostility has declined compared to the past, subtle forms of othering and "cautious intimacy" persist.

Conversely, the theme of Construction of Harmony captured experiences of cultural interaction, inclusive teacher practices, and social acceptance. The findings suggest that schools in Mardin function simultaneously as spaces of inequality and as microcosms of democracy. When teachers employed inclusive pedagogical approaches and acknowledged religious differences respectfully, students' sense of belonging and academic engagement strengthened. The study concludes that while structural barriers remain, everyday interactions and inclusive teaching can transform schools into spaces of democratic coexistence.

This paper argues for the need to turn decolonial rhetoric (‘knowing’) into anti-colonial praxis (‘acting’) in public school Religious Education (RE). This is to address the “so what must I do” quandary that often lingers when educators are confronted with the reality about the colonial embeddedness in RE, as in indeed across the school curriculum. It is an issue poignantly evident in the Western academy where (dis)engagement with coloniality is often met with rationales of white fragility exemplified by silence such as "... nothing to add" (DiAngelo, 2021: 1), which, in effect, is "... a form of ... psychological violence…” (Pillay, 2016: 157) and amidst indefensible denials of "I did not colonise anyone" or "colonialism wasn't all that bad" (see Bigger, 2024).

It is worth noting the insidious entanglements of religion and education in colonial structures of domination being a school subject “… at the epicentre of all European Empires” (Gearon et al., 2021: 1). RE has existed as a form of schooling functioning as an instrument in “… bringing into being of new subjects and new subjectivities” (Hall, 2008: 774). RE has perpetuated epistemic erasure of non-normative religious knowledge by its prioritisation of hegemonic knowledge (through neo/confessional approaches) as the “official knowledge” in the curriculum (Matemba, 2025).

In the wider European context, there have been attempts to decolonise RE through the embedding of religious diversity and/or adoption of worldviews approach (see Poulter, Riitaoja and Kuusisto, 2016). In the absence of an anti-colonial stance, coloniality still exists in RE perpetuated not only by educators who have not undergone the process of anti-colonial reflexivity but also the hegemonic interpretations of normative religions "texts" and classroom discourse (Matemba, 2024; Moosavi, 2023).

Thus, even in cases where religious pluralisation exists, the conceptualised of RE is still based on “limited pluralism” in which normative religions are selected or prioritised as “official knowledge”, hence delegitimising “other” forms of religious/non-religious knowledge in RE (Matemba, 2024). RE’s failure to engage critically with “uncomfortable conversations” related to discreditable disclosures of the colonial empire (e.g., dehumanisation through slavery and racism) is a lingering problem to be challenged by engaging educators, and indeed children, in a pedagogy of discomfort (Zembylas, 2015), supported by a kind of RE that moves "beyond learning" and without "authoritarian control" (Biesta, 2025: 41,51).

In turning RE decolonial rhetoric into anti-colonial praxis, the paper utilises anti-colonial theory for RE (AcTRE) (see Matemba, 2021, 2024, 2025), which has radical analytical tools in critiquing the colonial settled status of a school subject connected to “religion-normativity” - that is how normative religions serve a "colonising" function as part of schooling culture being, as it were, a reflection of the socio-cultural normativism in places where such religions are dominant. AcTRE illuminates the failure of RE in dealing with coloniality inherent in how it is conceptualised and practised. AcTRE provides theoretical perspectives to critique how RE engages with the neo/colonial encounter in its dealings with hegemonic knowledge and also highlights how those with the mandate to oversee the subject can be empowered with knowledge, attitudes and disposition towards providing an equitable epistemological space ensuring the co-existence of pluriversal ways of knowing in RE (Matemba, 2024).

Two objectives provide the guide for this paper. To examine the ways in which AcTRE can serve a dual role in facilitating a critique of the colonised status of RE whilst also offering analytical tools that support the development of an anti-colonial reflective mindset in classroom practitioners. Secondly, cognisant of Biesta’s concept of “subjectification” (e.g., learners’ ethical agency and engagement with pluriversal knowledge (Biesta, 2011)), to engage in anti-colonial praxis through the theoretical lens of AcTRE.

Over the last three decades, Network 7 has made a significant contribution to the interrogation of practice in different contexts and the development of new ideas, given the particular challenges of the respective times. Currently, new challenges are arising, leading to new questions and a new need to investigate, create ideas and respond. What is the larger context of these challenges, how can they be approached, what theories do we choose and how can we keep listening into those areas that are typically under-addressed, forgotten, neglected, ignored or even silenced?

It is typical for Network 7 that the attention goes to those unseen, unheard, marginalised or even violently excluded or hurt. The pain, it seems, is where the attention is directed towards, asking about what has caused the pain, how it can be contextualised and what could lead out of it. The latter, however, is not always easily found, and many studies only lead into various forms of critique, and understandably so, as critique is necessary and ideas for a path forward are not readily developed. Or in other words: It seems so much easier to say what we do not want than to create suggestions about what we actually do want.

However, as we live in a time of unrest and turbulence, new ideas could be highly helpful. While there might be feelings of powerlessness and frustration, such times always offer particularly high potential for change, and they can lay bare what is important to us or what we hope for, facilitating a language of forward-looking ideas that include a responsibility beyond personal interests (Hoppe 2024).

While concerns about the normalisation of right-extremist ideologies and the continuity or even reinforcement of neo-colonial and neo-liberal structures are at the thematic core of network 7, they are to be seen in the wider context of the breathtakingly fast rise of AI which increases the volume of dominant voices while reproducing bias in an exponential dynamic, and making it very easy for propaganda and fake information to be spread. Additionally, climate change and the loss of biodiversity as well as wars and mental health crises are shaping our time, to mention only a few of our huge challenges and the need to make suggestions for new ways of thinking.

Maybe it’s not surprising that one of the suggestions to ‘think out of the box’ comes from somebody who knows marginalisation from her own (family) experience. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (2021), dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada, points out that our current times need healing in many regards: healing the ways we think, feel, relate, exchange and face cycles of life and death. Her approach goes to the depth of the wound, and accordingly she suggests a concept for ‘depth education’ that is guided by questions such as ‘How can we learn to choose sobriety, maturity, discernment and responsibility in a culture (of late modernity) that often promotes and rewards the opposite’? Her suggestions have grown out of a cooperation with indigenous communities and offer perspectives that seem inspiring and truly ‘beyond the box’.

The aim of this paper is to step back a little bit and to think about different ideas and perspectives – such as the one developed by Andreotti – that could be promising for our research and our processes of ‘imagineering’ which hopefully contribute to meeting the challenges of our time.