Powerful powerlessness: white teachers’ negotiations of racialised difference and privilege in Danish high schools

TY - JOUR

T1 - Powerful powerlessness

T2 - white teachers’ negotiations of racialised difference and privilege in Danish high schools

AU - Khawaja, Iram

PY - 2024/7

Y1 - 2024/7

N2 - In Danish high schools, questions of diversity, whiteness and racialisation play out in various ways in the pedagogical encounters between students and teachers. Most often, teachers are racialised, majoritised, white and socialised in societal and educational contexts of silencing such differences and privileges. Drawing on theories of racialised affect, pedagogies of discomfort and pedagogical encounters as differentiated entanglements of bodies, spaces and affects, this article demonstrates how racialised differentiations shape teachers’ ways of negotiating and affectively engaging in contested educational spaces. The study uses memory work as an affective methodology to capture teachers’ recollections of challenging pedagogical encounters of shame, anger and discomfort. Analysis focuses on teachers’ narratives and negotiations of these situations. Two situations are analysed, one in which a teacher is confronted with white privilege and another in which a teacher is accused of racism. The notion of powerful powerlessness is presented as a viable way to understand white teachers’ subtle, complex affective reactions and positionality

AB - In Danish high schools, questions of diversity, whiteness and racialisation play out in various ways in the pedagogical encounters between students and teachers. Most often, teachers are racialised, majoritised, white and socialised in societal and educational contexts of silencing such differences and privileges. Drawing on theories of racialised affect, pedagogies of discomfort and pedagogical encounters as differentiated entanglements of bodies, spaces and affects, this article demonstrates how racialised differentiations shape teachers’ ways of negotiating and affectively engaging in contested educational spaces. The study uses memory work as an affective methodology to capture teachers’ recollections of challenging pedagogical encounters of shame, anger and discomfort. Analysis focuses on teachers’ narratives and negotiations of these situations. Two situations are analysed, one in which a teacher is confronted with white privilege and another in which a teacher is accused of racism. The notion of powerful powerlessness is presented as a viable way to understand white teachers’ subtle, complex affective reactions and positionality

KW - racialization

KW - pedagogical encounters

KW - white shame

KW - pedagogies of discomfort

KW - memory work

M3 - Journal article

SN - 2379-3414

JO - Whiteness and Education

JF - Whiteness and Education

ER -