Conference Agenda

Early September in the 2025–2026 academic year, as in previous years, was marked by excitement and anticipation among teachers and students in the Department of International Studies in Education at the University of Iceland (UI). This moment, however, revealed that such excitement is never guaranteed; it is contingent, fragile, and shaped by how international students are able to navigate the regimes governing their arrival. UI requires international students to be physically present on campus by a specified date. In earlier years, this requirement had not posed a major challenge, as student numbers were lower and the programme retained flexibility to start slightly later, in recognition of the well-documented barriers faced by students from outside the EU/Schengen area related to visa processing and border bureaucracies (Liu 2024).

In 2025, however, in an effort to align the programme with a universal start date, UI initially attempted to revoke the enrolment of students whose residence permits had not yet been issued, despite these students having submitted all required documentation to the relevant authorities in a timely manner. Although the university was aware of a 30% increase in international applications as early as February 2025, it did not coordinate with affected departments or faculties to adjust programme timelines, nor did it notify the Directorate of Immigration (DoI) of the increased demand for student permits. While the students were ultimately permitted to enrol, the delay produced prolonged uncertainty, leaving their educational trajectories and futures in limbo.

Drawing on this case, the paper develops the concept of epistemic bordering as a form of violence enacted at the intersection of higher education and migration regimes. The internationalisation of higher education (Halldórsdóttir & Gollifer 2018) is deeply entangled with migration governance (Jacobsen et al. 2021; Wyss 2022), epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Anderson 2012), and whiteness (Ahmed 2007). We show that, while UI’s strategic plan emphasises inclusion and internationalisation, higher education remains embedded within migration regimes that generate exclusion and subtler forms of violence by (re)producing territorial and epistemic boundaries between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ knowledge.

We argue that higher education in the Global North—widely regarded as intellectually valuable and desirable within former colonial and neoliberal systems—produces epistemic paradigms that define what counts as ‘science’, ‘expert knowledge’, ‘intellectual property’, and the ‘authorised codes of academic communication’ (Torkaman Rad 2023). By foregrounding epistemic bordering as a central form of harm produced through internationalisation, we demonstrate how knowledge hierarchies are formed that “unjustly organise human hierarchies in place and reify uneven geographies in a familiar, seemingly natural way” (McKittrick 2006, p. 33).

Within higher education contexts shaped by racialised politics and asymmetries, these epistemic paradigms sustain hierarchies in which white institutions and white knowledge function as a superstructure. Ahmed’s (2010) concept of happy objects helps illuminate how these institutions and epistemic formations produce affective attachments that render whiteness as the natural site of academic fulfilment and professional success. Consequently, investment in white institutions and white knowledge is framed as necessary for securing a viable future (Shahjahan & Edwards 2022). At the same time, access to this knowledge is restricted, rendered conditional, and unevenly distributed. We argue that international students, particularly those from outside the EU/Schengen area, experienced not only significant material harm through financial, emotional, and intellectual investments—such as costly English language tests, application and registration fees, and housing deposits—but also prolonged uncertainty due to delayed or withheld residence permits (No Border Iceland, 13 September 2025). These experiences constitute a distinct form of harm conceptualised here as epistemic bordering.

Universities are infiltrated by power dynamics that marginalise the knowledge, perspectives and work of racialized researchers and interviewees. In this article, we reconstruct our reflexive process of thinking in the context of the leading question: How can we, as racialised researchers, collectively negotiate racial capitalism critical educational research in and with the white academic machinery.

Following Spivak (2020), we understand epistemic violence as the systematic erasure and deformation of non-white voices by colonial knowledge systems that determine who is authorized to speak and whose knowledge is recognized as valuable. In order to understand power relations not only one-dimensionally but multidimensionally, we follow Collins (1990) in understanding that power relations are intersectionally intertwined and manifest themselves through different forms of violence.

In the case of German universities as places of teaching and learning, the example of the University of Hamburg, which was founded as a former colonial institution, illustrates how colonial legacies have been embedded in the institutional structures of today's universities (C. Çağlar & Akue-Dovi 2025; Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al. 2016; Mancheno & Al-Windi 2023). Black scholars such as Auma (in Piorkowski 2020), Kuria (2015) and Kilomba (2010) emphasise that white, Western, cis-male perspectives are centralised in the German academic landscape. Studies (e.g. Amiri 2020; Aslan 2017), special issues in journals (e.g. G. Çağlar et al. 2025) and anthologies (e.g. Heitzmann & Houda 2020) address powerful practices of racialisation that cement white dominance in German academia and massively restrict the ability of racialised students and researchers to act. This dynamics of exclusion are not limited to Germany and can be observed internationally, as Ahmed (2012) demonstrates especially for the British context.

As racialised early-career researchers – a female researcher of colour and a Black researcher, this raises questions for us, like e.g.: What role do researchers and their methods play in maintaining white science? (How) Can non-white epistemologies exist in white universities? And is it even possible to conduct research without reproducing power relations? These questions have been on our minds since the beginning of our doctoral projects.

To answer these questions, and in particular the key question listed above, we reflect on (2) power dynamics in academia (operating globally), such as (2.1) epistemic violence or epistemicide, (2.2) racial capitalism, and (2.3) researchers' standpoints and tokenisation. Building on this, we consider (3) methodologies of epistemic resistance (as well operating globally) such as (3.1) epistemic disobedience, (3.2) participatory research, and (3.3) epistemic humbleness: an epistemology of listening. The insights gained from the power dynamics and methodologies discussed form the basis of our methodological manifesto of Collaborative-Counter-Research (short CCR).

Our position as racialised researchers makes the question of joint, resistant knowledge production a central one. The perspectives formulated in Collaborative-Counter-Research create an innovative way of thinking about scholarly collaboration in a white academic environment that both integrates and marginalises us. This experience of researching within and against the system gives rise to the need to constantly rethink our own practice – as a counter-movement, as knowledge based on solidarity.

Processes of othering can be understood as relational and situated practices through which difference is produced, negotiated, and lived within unequal social relations. Within Borderlands Theory (Anzaldúa, 1987), othering is not conceptualised as a fixed and deficit positioning of an “outsider,” but as a dynamic process of bordering, the continual making and unmaking of epistemological, affective, and social boundaries through everyday practice (Bornstein-Gómez, 2010). Borders, from this perspective, are not limited to geopolitical or institutional demarcations; they are relational formations sustained through language, space, affect, and power, and lived across multiple scales of everyday life (Hernández & Anzaldúa, 1995).

Anzaldúa’s dialogical writings emphasise that borderlands are lived conditions rather than abstract locations. Subjects situated within borderlands are compelled to navigate contradictory regimes of meaning and belonging, producing hybrid knowledges that both reflect and exceed dominant classifications (Anzaldúa et al., 2003; Bornstein-Gómez, 2010). Bordering thus operates as a process through which difference is rendered intelligible, normalised, or marked as excessive within everyday encounters.

From a sociology of childhood perspective, these bordering processes are enacted through ordinary social practices rather than imposed solely through formal categories. Childhood is not a natural or universal stage, but a socially constructed condition actively produced through everyday relations and institutional arrangements (Prout, 1997). Attending to children’s everyday experiences highlights how borders are enacted through routine practices such as language use, spatial organisation, peer relations, and adult interpretations of behaviour. Schools can therefore be understood as borderland spaces in which children are required to negotiate multiple and often contradictory expectations of belonging, normality, and difference.

Educational research further demonstrates how schooling functions as a key site for the reproduction of social and spatial borders. Studies of schooling in Turkey show how institutional practices intersect with neighbourhood, class, and ethnic divisions, producing exclusions that are both material and symbolic. From an Anzaldúan perspective, these practices can be understood as bordering processes that position certain children as perpetually out of place, even while they are formally included within the school system.

Guided by this framework, the central research question of the study is:

How is children’s othering enacted as a form of bordering in everyday school practices, and how do children from minoritised groups experience and negotiate these borderlands within educational settings?

The study focuses on children from minoritised communities in Turkey. These groups inhabit intersecting borderlands shaped by ethnicity, language, migration status, and socio-spatial segregation. As Bornstein-Gómez (2010) argues, border subjects are positioned within uneven regimes of knowledge and power, yet they also generate meanings and practices that exceed dominant educational categorizations.

Empirical findings from the Çanakkale region in north-western Turkey illustrate how socio-spatial bordering is reproduced through schooling. Teachers’ descriptions of Roman children as belonging to “other villages” or “other neighbourhoods” enact symbolic borders that position these children as simultaneously present and out of place. Such practices demonstrate how schools extend and reinforce borders already operating across family, community, and local geographies, echoing Anzaldúa’s insistence that borders are lived across multiple dimensions of everyday life (Reuman & Anzaldúa, 2000).

By mobilising Borderlands Theory through Anzaldúa’s dialogical and interpretive texts, and situating it within sociological approaches to childhood, this study conceptualises children’s othering as an unstable and relational process of bordering. This framing foregrounds the embodied and affective dimensions of exclusion and belonging, while positioning schools as borderland spaces where inequalities are reproduced, negotiated, and potentially reconfigured. In these in-between places, othering becomes a space where a new understanding of subjectivity, knowledge, and relationship can surface, uncovering the classroom not only as a place of regulation but also as one of possibility.

This research examines Toxicity for Black Female Professionals in Higher Education. Through our own toxic experiences which is the justification for looking at this area, we are interested in what Black and mixed-race colleagues have to say about their own toxic experiences (Bonell, 2025). Our hypotheses statement is higher education environments are indeed becoming more toxic, with ongoing turbulences, as we witness more redundancies and voluntary and compulsory severance in UK (United Kingdon) Higher Education, and beyond (Andrew, 2020). By examining the definition of toxicity beyond poisonous environments we have attempted to conceptualise toxicity which we will examine in this paper. There is a wider literature on this specific issue e.g. Arday and Mirza, 2018, Maistry, 2024.

One toxic solution to these issues is continuing professional development which covers diverse environments, including staff (Race, 2024). The criticism is that compulsory training in higher education has become virtual and depersonalised where there is no chance of asking questions, within group environments, let alone receiving answers that can improve professional practice and the behaviour of all colleagues in higher education. DiAngelo (2019, 2021) has expressed this experience through her professional practice when teaching racism. This is applicable in all areas, not only within higher education. Warmington (2024) explains that applications of Critical Race Theory (CRT) begin with colour blindness and the need to recognise institutional racism. Warmington argues that the notion of institutional racism must be defended as it is being attacked by political interests. The notion of anti-racism is therefore politically questionable when it needs to be part of professional practice within a more inclusive, equitable practice. How do Black (Female) Professionals respond to race and racist issues in higher education?

Bhopal (2024a) argues that by performing and enacting Whiteness, some academics of Colour mirror White Behaviours. As a result, they are rewarded and gain entrance into the White space of higher education, but the main beneficiary from this process is the White Academy, leaving structural and institutional racism intact. The author argues that Black and mixed-race academics are complicit in upholding White Supremacy, and by doing so protect the interests of White groups. But as the literature underlines, the issues are systematic and, in this case, universities need to change to reduce toxicity. As Bhopal (2024b: 232) highlights: ‘In order for schools and universities to make meaningful and significant changes, they must examine their role in perpetuating racism … Ways of tackling these issues tend to come under the umbrella of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) … [and] the topic of race can become lost among other types of inequality deemed to be more worthy … Educational institutions are able to ‘tick the box’ to demonstrate that they are meeting their EDI targets without actually addressing racial inequalities.’ Bhopal (2004a, 2024b) is instructive and methodologically useful, with the use of interviewing in this area of research, as she shows how structural and institutional racism hinders the fact of addressing racism. One potential solution for Black Female Professionals is to mirror White Behaviour for career advancement but what happens if toxic incidents or experiences hinders or eliminates the chances of this professional strategy?

Our paper sets out why we are both carrying out this research. We will conceptualise the notion of toxicity and cover the key literature which contextualises our research. We will then explain out two stage methodology of interviewing respondents who have shared their toxic experiences within higher education, highlighting several ethical issues. We will conclude with our data themes and recommendations that aims ultimately to reduce levels of toxicity for Black Professionals within higher education.