Conference Agenda

This panel 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 panel 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 panel 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 panel 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 panel 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 panel 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 panel 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.

Drawing on auto-ethnographic reflection, the paper explores positioning as a dynamic process shaped through interactions with racialized students and white colleagues within a predominantly white higher education institution. Two interconnected observations guide the analysis. First, racialized students and lecturers are routinely positioned as carrying the labor of diversity and inclusion, encountering simultaneously white fragility, claims of neutrality and institutional resistance. Second, the research process of the first author revealed how different aspects of her positioning became salient at different moments, enabling research relationships, knowledge production and pedagogical possibilities. Interactions with students made visible what students educated in a University of Applied Sciences need to transgress in order to decenter whiteness. This includes dominant epistemic norms, affective investments and assumptions of innocence. At the same time, engagement with colleague lecturers exposed how whiteness operates as an institutional logic that shapes what counts as legitimate knowledge, pedagogy and critique. Theoretically, the lens of Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso 2005) foregrounds the relational, experiential and cultural resources that racialized students and teachers bring into the educational spaces and that can be mobilized toward institutional change. By reconceptualizing positioning as process rather than positionality as a fixed attribute, this paper contributes to the overall focus on pedagogy and change in the symposium. It argues that reflexive, positioning-aware teaching and policies can move beyond describing racism toward actively transforming it. Doing so, makes the limits and tensions of such work within white institutions visible.

Yosso *, T. J. 2005. Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. doi:10.1080/1361332052000341006

This paper builds on a previous ECER contribution that examined how spaces of Danish higher education are entangled with processes of race and social class, shaping students’ embodied experiences of belonging and non-belonging (Li, 2025). The earlier paper analyzed the spaces of higher education as a space of prestige that simultaneously functions as a space of underrepresentation. For instance, entering the auditorium is shown to be a non-neutral act: through spatial arrangements, linguistic codes, and unspoken norms, students’ bodies are read, positioned, and policed, producing layered forms of exclusion across race, class, and geography (Li, 2025, Li & Hilgart, 2026 forthcoming). Building on this analysis, the present paper shifts focus from research to pedagogy, asking how knowledge produced through research on racialization—and the researcher’s own positionality in conducting such research—can be translated into teaching in higher education. Specifically, the paper explores how pedagogies of discomfort (Zembylas, 2015) can be mobilized to address the classed and racialized spaces of academia and to engage students in critical reflections on belonging, privilege, and inequality within the social sciences and humanities. Theoretically, the paper draws on feminist and critical scholarship on positionality and racial discomfort, foregrounding positioning as an ongoing, relational, and reflexive process through which educators negotiate their relationships to power, whiteness, and racialization (Zembylas, 2015, 2025). Methodologically, it draws on autoethnography and reflexive engagement with teaching and researching experiences in higher education, focusing on moments of discomfort that arise when teaching about racialized topics, bodies, and spaces (Khawaja, 2022; Vertelyte et al., 2024). The paper asks: What forms of discomfort emerge when teaching with and through research on racialization? How do racially minoritized educators navigate assumptions, emotional labor, and risks of (re)traumatization in the classroom? And how can discomfort be pedagogically channeled in ways that challenge hegemonic norms while also creating possibilities for critical hope and social transformation (Connelly & Joseph-Salisbury, 2019; Hooks, 2014)? By bringing research on racialized academic spaces into pedagogical practice, the paper contributes to sociological and feminist debates on higher education teaching, arguing that discomfort is not a pedagogical failure but a necessary condition for challenging the exclusionary logics and practices of the university.

Connelly, Laura, & Joseph-Salisbury, Remi. (2019). Teaching Grenfell: The Role of Emotions in Teaching and Learning for Social Change. Sociology, 53(6), 1026–1042. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038519841826 Hooks, B. (2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. Khawaja, I. (2022). Memory Work as Engaged Critical Pedagogy. Nordic Journal of Social Research, 13(1), 94–107. https://doi.org/10.18261/njsr.13.1.8 Li, J. H. (2025). Racialization in Danish HE spaces and students' professional development and aspirations. Abstract fra ECER 2025, Beograd, Serbien. https://eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/conference/30/contribution/61183 Li, J. H., & Hilgart, A. B. (Forthcoming). The affective orientations of racial and gendered trauma among racial minoritized students in Danish Higher Education. Studies in Higher Education. Millner, N. (2023). Unsettling feelings in the classroom: scaffolding pedagogies of discomfort as part of decolonising human geography in higher education. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 47(5), 805–824. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2021.2004391 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. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5117/TVGN2024.2-3.011.VERT Zembylas, M. (2015). ‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: the tensions of ethical violence in social justice education. Ethics and Education, 10(2), 163–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2015.1039274

This paper reflects on how researcher positioning can support the development of a critical pedagogical practice in education research and practice that claims to use a decolonial lens. Using an international research project (the Horizon project EXPECT_Art, 2024-2026) as an illustrative case study, the paper explores how researchers’ reflections and statements regarding identity‑focused and/or theoretical positionality shape, enable, and potentially limit their ability to enact solidarity‑oriented methodological and ethical approaches. In doing so, it highlights the tensions between self-articulated positionality and the practical enactment of decolonial commitments in research and education practice. This paper builds in part on a forthcoming article that reflects on the research project’s decolonial stance (Jacobsen, 2026 forthcoming) and contributes to ongoing debates on performative decoloniality (Cheney, 2018; Two Convivial Thinkers, 2024; Vergès, 2018). In the present paper, these insights are extended through a discussion of research‑informed teaching at the university level, thereby situating the argument within broader debates on the decolonisation of the university (Dei, 2016). More specifically, the paper discusses the performativity of decolonial commitments. It raises questions such as: How can scholars who claim a decolonial framework avoid reproducing colonial and patriarchal relations within academic institutions, in both research and teaching? How do universities continue to invisibilise certain bodies and epistemologies, even within frameworks labelled as decolonial (Dei, 2016)? And how might decoloniality be applied reflexively: directed inward to interrogate one’s own entanglement in systems of power (Zembylas, 2019, 2025), rather than merely outwardly as a critique of society? As an empirical example, the paper draws on experiences from an EXPECT_Art workshop, where researchers tested a method usually used with children in school – decoding and interpreting artworks (Jacobsen & Nielsen, 2026 forthcoming) – to facilitate shared reflexivity on positionality. In this workshop, all participating researchers were white majority subjects, while the artists were racialised and the artworks explicitly addressed racialisation. The analysis highlights participants’ reflections on power relations, including how artists’ and researchers’ positionalities were negotiated in relation to one another and to broader societal contexts. The example points to the relationship between researchers’ identity-based declarations of positionality and their engagement with deeper, solidarity-oriented dimensions of positionality, illustrating how more reflexive approaches can support critical educational research.

Cheney, K. (2018). Decolonizing childhood studies: Overcoming patriarchy and prejudice in child-related research and practice. Reimagining childhood studies, 91-104. Dei, G. (2016). Decolonizing the university: The challenges and possibilities of inclusive education. Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 11(1), 23-23. Jacobsen, G. H. & Nielsen, K. L. (2026, forthcoming). Fortæl dem! Popsange som public pedagogy og afsæt for synliggørelse af kritisk kulturel literacy [Tell Them! Pop Music as Public Pedagogy and Basis for Making Critical Cultural Literacy Visible]. Tidsskrift for æstetik og pædagogik. Jacobsen, G. H. (2026, forthcoming). Reflections on Researching Critical Cultural Literacy in a Decolonial Perspective. Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia. Two Convivial Thinkers (2024). (Un)Doing performative decolonization in the global development ‘imaginaries’ of academia, Global Discourse, 14(2-3) Vergès, F. (2018). Decolonial feminist teaching and learning: What is the space of decolonial feminist teaching?. In S. de Jong, R. Icaza, & O. U. Rutazibwa (Eds.) Decolonization and feminisms in global teaching and learning (pp. 91-102). Routledge. Zembylas, M. (2019). Re-conceptualizing complicity in the social justice classroom: affect, politics and anti-complicity pedagogy. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 28(2), 317–331 Zembylas, M. (2025). Rethinking positionality statements in research: from looking back to building solidarity. International Journal of Research