Conference Agenda

This symposium explores how race, positionality, and positioning shape educational research and pedagogy, with particular attention to predominantly White educational spaces in Europe. Drawing on critical race theory (Yosso 2023), black feminist scholarship (Ladson-billing 2003), and critical pedagogies (hooks 1995; Freire 2021), the panel addresses a persistent challenge in educational research: how to meaningfully engage with racialized power relations in research and teaching without reducing positionality to static identity statements or reproducing race-evasive practices.

While positionality has become a common feature in educational research, emerging scholarship questions whether positionality statements alone are sufficient for addressing racism as an epistemic, methodological, and pedagogical issue (Zembylas, 2025). Building on this critique, the symposium foregrounds positioning as an ongoing, reflexive, and relational process through which researchers and educators actively negotiate their relationships to systems of power, whiteness, and racialization over time (Zembylas, 2025).

The symposium explores what educational research and reflections on positionality can contribute to the development of critical and feminist pedagogies of race—and what needs to be brought from research into the classroom.

Theoretical and Conceptual Framing

The symposium is grounded in feminist and critical traditions that conceptualize positionality not as a fixed identity but as relational, contextual, and historically produced (Misawa, 2010). Feminist scholars have long emphasized reflexivity and positionality as central to both research and teaching. Yet, tensions remain between Freirean critical pedagogy—where oppression is often conceptualized in structural and binary terms—and feminist poststructuralist understandings of positionality as multiple and shifting (Weiler, 2001). Freire’s emphasis on situationality and critical consciousness remains influential for social justice education, however constructivist pedagogies risk individualizing and essentializing positionality if they fail to historicize knowledge and the systems of reasoning through which subjects come to know.

Recent work further complicates these debates by highlighting how racialized researchers experience positionality differently across contexts, particularly when researching racism within education (Gobena et al., 2025). This includes how others’ perceptions of race shape research encounters, ethical relations, and pedagogical authority—especially in Nordic and European contexts marked by persistent claims of innocence from colonialism and racism.

This symposium addresses the following interrelated themes:

• Positioning vs. positionality: What does it mean to move from static positionality statements to forward-looking, action-oriented practices of positioning in educational research (Zembylas, 2025)?
• Research informed teaching: How can such research practices inspire teaching in higher education? What do students trained in white institutions need to transgress (hooks 1994) and decenter whiteness?
• Pedagogy and change: How can insights from research on positionality and racialization be translated into pedagogical practices that move beyond describing conditions of racism toward actively transforming them?

By combining descriptive analyses of racialized conditions in education with pedagogical commitments to change, this symposium responds to calls for racially-just ecologies of knowledge, shaped by epistemologies and methodologies that challenge dominating knowledge systems while embracing the principle of incompleteness of knowledge (Santos 2014). It foregrounds the ethical, methodological, and pedagogical implications of race and positionality, particularly for scholars and students navigating liminal or minoritized positions within academia.

The symposium contributes to the Social Justice Education network by offering theoretically grounded and empirically informed reflections on how positioning can function as a critical pedagogical practice—one that historicizes knowledge, disrupts whiteness, and fosters solidarities oriented toward social action.

This paper examines how racialised positioning operates as a methodological condition in educational research conducted within predominantly White institutional contexts in Denmark. As a brown, visibly minoritised female educational researcher who wears a headscarf, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork to explore how my body, presence, and research focus on racialisation and inequality are read, negotiated, and ascribed meaning by teachers in the field. Rather than treating positionality as a static identity statement, the paper foregrounds positioning as an ongoing, relational process shaped by others’ perceptions, institutional norms, and racialised power relations (Thapar- Björkert & Farahani, 2019; Zembylas, 2025). Across multiple research encounters, my presence has at times generated unease, particularly when conversations touch upon sensitive issues such as discrimination, language use, pupil categorisation, and race. This unease is expressed through linguistic caution, explicit negotiations over “acceptable” terminology, bodily signs of discomfort, avoidance of contact, and, in some cases, challenges to my professional legitimacy. These interactions illuminate what recent scholarship conceptualises as perceived racialised positionality (PRP): the ways in which researchers’ racialised bodies are interpreted by others, shaping ethical relations, access, and authority in the research process (Gobena et al., 2025). The paper argues that such moments of friction are not merely interpersonal but structurally produced within educational systems marked by whiteness, race-evasiveness, and claims of innocence, particularly in Nordic and European contexts (Clark, K., & Vertelyté, 2023; Wekker, 2016). These dynamics actively shape what can be said, what remains unspeakable, and what forms of data become accessible (Milner, 2007; Berger, 2015). At the same time, racialised positioning can also generate specific forms of insight, enabling critical readings of silences, hesitations, and affective responses that might otherwise remain unexamined. By situating researcher positionality as a methodological and epistemic condition rather than a personal attribute, the paper contributes to feminist and critical debates on knowledge production in education. It highlights how reflexive engagement with racialised positioning can move beyond descriptive accounts of positionality toward a more critical practice of positioning—one that exposes how racism operates through everyday research interactions and informs the development of critical and feminist pedagogies of race in higher education (Hooks, 2014).

Berger, R. (2015). Now I see it, now I don’t: Researcher’s position and reflexivity in qualitative research. Qualitative research, 15(2), 219-234. Clark, K., & Vertelyté, M. (2023). Educational Challenges for Nordic Exceptionalism: Epistemic Injustice in the absence of Antiracist Education. In E. L. Engebretsen & M. Liinason (Eds.), Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe: Critical Essays on Knowledge, Inequality and Belonging (pp. 33–50). Routledge. Gobena, E. B., Dickstein, J. D., Zeleke, G., & Dansholm, K. K. (2025). Beyond “Where do you really come from?”: : Rethinking positionality and racial dynamics in Nordic exceptionalism. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 16(1 SE-Articles). https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.6085 hooks, b. (2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. Milner IV, H. R. (2007). Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen. Educational researcher, 36(7), 388-400. Thapar- Björkert, S., & Farahani, F. (2019). Epistemic modalities of racialised knowledge production in the Swedish academy. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(16), 214–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1649440 Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race. Duke University Press. Zembylas, M. (2025). Rethinking positionality statements in research: from looking back to building solidarity. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 48(5), 466–478. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2025.2475762

Although racialized hierarchies are understood as dynamic and shifting, positionality statements often remain static. As a PhD student, I have experienced unease when requests narrow my position to racial categorization. Complying with such requests by stating my non-white position within Sweden’s racial regime may appear straightforward. However, my reluctance to acquire what Zembylas (2025) term authorizing “certificates” reflects the risk of reifying racial categories without unsettling underlying power dynamics (Gani & Khan, 2024). This presentation explores how autobiographical reflections function as a site for theorizing and re experiencing racialized power relations by positioning personal experience as an active analytic resource (hooks, 1994) within collective efforts to challenge racism. As inherently partial and messy narrative acts, such reflections offer critical alternatives to imagined pure identities (Fang, 2019; Kerr, 2024) by approaching subjectivity not as fixed but as relational and dynamic. Drawing on relational psychoanalytic theories, subjectivity is understood as a micro context in which inner life is intertwined with, yet irreducible to, sociohistorical conditions (Layton, 2020), shaped by social power structures as well as by unconscious processes, desires, and the reciprocal shaping of inner and outer worlds (Farhadi, 2019). Empirically, the presentation draws on my PhD project where I held repeated small group interviews with lower-secondary students about racism in school and collaborated with teachers adopting an action research approach to deepen our collective understanding of racism and strengthen teachers’ counteracting capacity. A third strand of the project consisted of my ongoing analytical-reflexive engagement with own experiences of racism and how they shaped the research process. During my interpretive practice, working across interview transcripts, literature, and autobiographical material, I began to theorize Swedishness, often conflated with whiteness, as a potential bad object for me and some of the participants. Drawing on Fairbairn (1952), who describes a bad object as an internalized relational figure that is simultaneously desired and experienced as rejecting or threatening, and building on Kerr’s (2024) expansion of the concept, Swedishness emerged as a desired yet unattainable object – one we could critique intellectually yet continued to seek affectively, and sometimes unconsciously. I propose that autobiographical reflection, when integrated with both abstract and context bound theorizing within an explicit anti racist ambition, can support meaningful changes in practice rather than merely reshaping declarations.

Fairbairn, W.R. (1952). Psychoanalytic studies of the personality. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fang, N. (2019). Narratively (Bang) Out of Order : On Hostile Environment. International Review of Qualitative Research, 12(4), 385–393. Farhadi, B. (2019). A psychoanalytic inquiry into reflexivity: An encounter with knowledge. Emotion, Space and Society, 31, 112–119. Gani, J.K., & Khan, R.M. (2024). Positionality Statements as a Function of Coloniality: Interrogating Reflexive Methodologies. International Studies Quarterly, 68(2), sqae038. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress. Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge. Kerr, N. (2024). Culture as the bad object. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 29. Layton, L. (2020). Intersectionality, normative unconscious processes, and racialized enactments of distinction. In M. Belkin & C. White (Eds.), Intersectionality and relational psychoanalysis: New perspectives on race, gender, and sexuality. Routledge. Zembylas, M. (2025). Rethinking positionality statements in research: from looking back to building solidarity. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 48(5), 466–478.

Calls from feminist and anti-racist scholars to question and critique dominant theories and methodologies have received little institutional support in the social sciences (Rizvi 2022). While higher educational institutions now teach students to reflect on their positionality, for example when writing their thesis, positionality statements tend to be performative rather than grounded in an evolving reflexivity and awareness of one’s own positioning (Zembylas 2025). This has particular consequences for awareness of racialization. While students’ awareness of sexual and gender inequalities in everyday life has increased over the past decade (Hertoghs et al. 2024), white students have limited experiences that motivate them to question the pretense of neutrality in their racialized positioning. As a consequence, awareness of racialization remains limited or not considered relevant in a white educational space, while the burden of educating white students heavily falls on the shoulders of students and teachers with racialized and minoritized positioning (Verteleyte et al. 2024, Wekker forthcoming). Inspired by critical whiteness studies (Rizvi 2022), this paper explores what ‘a critical pedagogy of positioning’ could look like in classrooms were racism is often ‘an elephant in the room’ (Verteleyte et al. 2024). Inspired by a critical phenomenological approach (Mattingly 2019) that guides much of my own research on religion, gender and sexuality as a white scholar in predominantly black contexts (e.g. East Africa and the African diaspora in Europe), I set out to develop a pedagogical approach to teaching on religion/race, gender and sexuality. In translating anthropological insights on positioning to pedagogy, I drew on bel hooks’ (1998) transgressive pedagogy and Augusto Boals’ Theatre of the Oppressed. In this paper I will auto-ethnographically reflect on my own teaching. I will argue that foregrounding the experiential while engaging with the moral and political is important for ‘a critical pedagogy of positioning’ (Mattingly 2019). However, while engaging with the experiential emerges as a powerful source for reflexivity related to positioning (Verteleyte et al. 2024), it remains challenging to unsettle fixed understandings of religion/race in predominantly white institutions for higher education (e.g. Mahmood 2011, Rizvi 2022).

Boal, A. (2000). Theater of the Oppressed. New ed. London: Pluto. Hertoghs, M., Isenia, W. J., Krebbekx, W., & Roodsaz, R. (2024). Recalcitrance and feminist pedagogy: Autoethnographic reflections on anti-gender mobilisations at the university. Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 27(2/3), 132-150. hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Mahmood, S. (2011). Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400839919 Mattingly, C. (2022). “Crisis, Alterity, and Tradition: An Anthropological Contribution to Critical Phenomenology.” Puncta 5 (2): 45–66. Rizvi, S. (2022) Racially-just epistemologies and methodologies that disrupt whiteness, International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 45:3, 225-231, Vertelyte, M., Gjørding, M. R., Khawaja, I., Plotnikof, M., Staunæs, D., & Sandager, J. (2024). Caring about the elephants in feminist classrooms. Tijdschrift Voor Genderstudies, 27(2/3), 265–285. Zembylas, M. (2025) Rethinking positionality statements in research: from looking back to building solidarity, International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 48:5, 466-478.