Powerful Powerlessness: Negotiations of white authority and loss of control in educational encounters with racialized minoritised students

TY - CONF

T1 - Powerful Powerlessness

T2 - NERA

AU - Khawaja, Iram

PY - 2024/3/7

Y1 - 2024/3/7

N2 - An increased number of ethnic minoritized students are pursuing high school education in Denmark which on a political level has been framed as a challenge of social cohesion in education which needs to be dealt with through national policies and plans such as student dispersal plans. On the level of the everyday life in high schools, however, questions of diversity, cohesion and difference play out in various ways and more specifically actualized in pedagogical encounters (Ahmed 2000, Davies & Ganon 2009) between students and teachers in diverse classrooms. Most often the teachers are racialized majoritized and white and they experience being met with expectations of having knowledge of issues such as racism, decolonial and social movements for change whilst being challenged on their authority and racialized positionality as teachers. Many students are knowledgeable about and engaged in questions of inequity, social justice, diversity, and power and are attentive to e.g. which words and images should be used or not- and not all teachers are as engaged in these questions having been socialized in a different time and age. Based on qualitative interviews with high school teachers utilizing memory work (Davies et al. 2001), this paper presents teachers’ narratives and experiences of negotiating their positionalities, privilege and power in the classroom where many express a feeling of being powerless. Drawing on theories focusing on racialized affect (Berg & Ramos 2015, Zembylas 2015), power and positionality and a theorization of pedagogical encounters as differentiated and racialized entanglements of bodies, spaces, and affects (Deleuze 1990, Puwar 2004, Khawaja et al. 2023), the paper analyzes how racialized differentiations take place in teachers’ ways of managing, negotiating, and affectively engaging in contested educational spaces in high schools in Denmark.

AB - An increased number of ethnic minoritized students are pursuing high school education in Denmark which on a political level has been framed as a challenge of social cohesion in education which needs to be dealt with through national policies and plans such as student dispersal plans. On the level of the everyday life in high schools, however, questions of diversity, cohesion and difference play out in various ways and more specifically actualized in pedagogical encounters (Ahmed 2000, Davies & Ganon 2009) between students and teachers in diverse classrooms. Most often the teachers are racialized majoritized and white and they experience being met with expectations of having knowledge of issues such as racism, decolonial and social movements for change whilst being challenged on their authority and racialized positionality as teachers. Many students are knowledgeable about and engaged in questions of inequity, social justice, diversity, and power and are attentive to e.g. which words and images should be used or not- and not all teachers are as engaged in these questions having been socialized in a different time and age. Based on qualitative interviews with high school teachers utilizing memory work (Davies et al. 2001), this paper presents teachers’ narratives and experiences of negotiating their positionalities, privilege and power in the classroom where many express a feeling of being powerless. Drawing on theories focusing on racialized affect (Berg & Ramos 2015, Zembylas 2015), power and positionality and a theorization of pedagogical encounters as differentiated and racialized entanglements of bodies, spaces, and affects (Deleuze 1990, Puwar 2004, Khawaja et al. 2023), the paper analyzes how racialized differentiations take place in teachers’ ways of managing, negotiating, and affectively engaging in contested educational spaces in high schools in Denmark.

KW - racialization

KW - affect

KW - memory work

KW - pedagogies of discomfort

KW - high school

KW - teacher

M3 - Paper

Y2 - 6 March 2024 through 8 March 2024

ER -