Due to migratory histories and accumulated processes of racialization, educational institutions are faced with the tasks to carry diversity work for creating inclusive and positive atmospheres (Stevenson, 2014) in diverse learning environments. Recent theoretical and empirical research have showed how feelings and moods are pertinent to critical pedagogies and diversity work, not least to matters of race and racial exclusions (Zembylas & McGlynn, 2012). For example, Sarah Ahmed (2014) writes that diversity work is ‘atmospheric work’ or mood work, to emphasize that different affects and feelings are always inscribed in diversity work interventions. Furthermore, research shows, how moods and affects related to issues of (interventions on) race and racism often turn into the ‘elephant in the room’ (Hvenegård-Lassen & Staunæs, 2021; Vertelyte &  Staunæs, 2021). This puts educators in the position of treating students’ racial experiences as highly sensitive issues that can only be dealt with at the ‘expense of the an undisturbed school climate’ (Stevenson, 2014). As such research on intercultural issues, injustices and diversity work in education requires paying attention to how affects such as discomfort, frustration, hopelessness, fear, among others, figure in everyday schooling experiences when issues of race, racism and injustice are at stake, and how, in turn, these affects co-constitute  diversity work (Grosland, 2019; Zembylas, 2020).

In this paper, we explore how educators at a gymnasium in greater Copenhagen do diversity work in an attempt to stir and control the atmospheres related to ethnic-racial minority participation in the school. Drawing from qualitative interviews with educators (teachers and principals), we explore the ways diversity interventions affectively materialize into and through specific things. Specifically, we explore how diversity work is enacted with use of furniture -  such as bookshelves used for intervening in ‘uncomfortable atmospheres’ associated with the concentration of ‘noisy’ ethnic-racial minority male students.

In this paper, we draw upon Ahmed’s notion of ‘happy object’ (Ahmed, 2012) which she uses to mark the celebration of  multiculturalism and diversity and how it paradoxically also contributes to racialized and gendered exclusions. However, we rephrase ‘happy objects’ into ‘hopeful things’ and looking through a feminist new materialist lens explore how particular things (imaginations as well as objects) materialize diversity work and bring forth tensions and affective investments as well as assemble hope. In other words, we explore, how ‘things’, such as book shelfs – are mattering matters in the ways they enable different affects and stirs the ‘moods’ of the school corridors. While asking what do hopeful things do for diversity work, we derive from the argument that racialized experiences come to matter through collective and affective atmospheres and moods (Ahmed, 2014; McCormack, 2018) that envelop and attune the students and educators’ ways of doing diversity work. Thereby, we show how affects are not just abstract, free-floating signifiers, but are manifest in materiality, such as, books, shelves and student bodies.

The data was collected in relation to the research project ‘Diversity work as mood work’, funded by the Independent Research Council, Denmark (see the link in the reference list). The aim of the project is to investigate students’ affectively imprinted racial-ethnic experiences and explore how educators attend to and approach collective moods and feelings among students associated with these experiences. Methodologically, the project was carried out at two different culturally diverse gymnasiums in Copenhagen. We conducted observations and interviews with majority and minority students, school principals, social workers and teachers. The project comprises of 25 interviews and two months of observations in the school (lectures, break, and outside-school activities/trips). The empirical material was produced in the period of 2020 June and 2021 August. This paper specifically draws on the material conducted on one the gymnasiums and 10 qualitative interviews with education staff (rector, vice rector, teachers, social workers). In the interviews, we asked educators about their everyday practices for diversity work. During the interviews, narratives about one particular intervention came to be indicative: the interlocutors repeatedly kept naming particular corridor in the otherwise celebrated architecture of the school - ‘the death row’ (in Danish ‘dødsgangen’). In the interviews, we followed the narratives about this particular place and educators strategies to re-design the room and thereby stir the atmosphere of the school into positive vibes. The gymnasium where we have collected our data is considered one of the most culturally diverse gymnasiums in Copenhagen, where so-called ethnic minority students make more than 50 percent of the school composition. In Denmark, categories used in school to refer to ethnic minority children have included ‘children of foreign workers’, ‘immigrant pupils’, ‘refugee children’, ‘foreign language pupils’, ‘bilingual pupils’, ‘ethnic minority pupils’, ‘descendants’, ‘2nd generation immigrants’ and recently ‘third generation immigrants and pupils. In everyday language, educators and students use the category ‘ethnic minority’. Yet, scholars have showed how this category is racialized (Lagermann, 2015; Jaffe-Walter, 2016), as it marks ethnic minority students as homogeneous group, who’s culture and religiosity is considered to be incompatible to Danish values and furthermore associated with body signs of refugees and migrants from the Global South as well as Asia and the Middle-East. To denote that ethnic minority is becoming a category associated with race, or a racialized category, we use the term ethnic-racialized students.

Empirically the paper shows how material such as book shelfs are used to intervene in and re-design the school’s corridor in order to break the ‘noise’ and ‘chaos’ associated with ethnic-racial minority boys gathering. Analysing the educators’ narratives on how ‘dødsgangen’ (was turned into ‘studiegangen’ (in English: the study-corridor), we show how ‘good atmosphere’ is maintained, visually and acoustically stabilized with the use of more-than-the-human actors, namely by very concrete things. We show how such intervention both reproduces racialized affects and at the same time creates spaces for a responsive pedagogic of change and inclusion This leads us to discuss the concept of ‘hopeful things’. While in Ahmed’s phenomenological approach, ‘happy objects’ do carry affective qualities and values and are more-than material things, deriving from a performative and feminist new materialist approach (Barad 2012), we seek to emphasize how concrete matter can ‘animate life’ (Chen 2012), make things happen and produce ambivalent affects. As such, we discuss the analytical potential when talking about ‘things’ versus ‘objects’. Moreover, through our analysis, we argue that such ‘things’ in diversity work (and its materializations) can be understood as hopeful as well as fearful in ways it is inscribed into the inclusionary visions and ‘care for/about’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) ethnic-racialized minority well-being. Lastly, we open for the theoretical discussion on ways objects are inscribed in affective atmospheres, showing how affective intensities are not abstract, free-floating signifiers, but directly inscribed in material interventions.

Ahmed, S. (2012). The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2014). Not in the mood. New formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, 82, 13-28. Barad, K. (2012). On Touching – the inhuman that therefore I am. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 23 (3): 206-223 Chen, M. Y. (2012) Animacies. Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press. Hvenegård-Lassen, K., & Staunæs, D. (2021) Shooting the elephant in the (prayer) room: Politics of moods, racial hauntologies and idiomatic diffraction in Vivienne Bozalek, Michalinos Zembylas, Siddique Motala and Dorothee Hölscher (eds.). Higher education hauntologies: Living with ghosts for a justice-to-come (London and New York: Routledge) 50–62. Jaffe-Walter, R. (2016). Coercive concern: Nationalism, liberalism, and the schooling of muslim youth Grosland, T. J. (2019). Through laughter and through tears: Emotional narratives to antiracist pedagogy. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 22(3), 301–318. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCormack, D. P. (2018). Atmospheric things : on the allure of elemental envelopment. Durham: Duke University Press. Lagermann, L. (2015). Ethnic Minority Students in – Or out of? – Education: Processes of Marginalization in and across School and Other Contexts. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 16(2), 139–161. Padovan-Özdemir, M. (2019). Fabricating a welfare civilization. In T. Øland, C. Ydesen, M. Padovan-Özdemir, & B. Moldenhawer (Eds.), Statecrafting on the fringes (pp. 91–165). Stevenson, H. C. (2014). Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools: Differences That Make a Difference. New York: Teachers College Press. Vertelyté, M., & Staunæs, D. (2021). From Tolerance Work to Pedagogies of Unease: Affective Investments in Danish Antiracist Education. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 7(3), 126-135 Zembylas, M., & McGlynn, C. (2012). Discomforting pedagogies: Emotional tensions, ethical dilemmas and transformative possibilities. British Educational Research Journal, 38(1), 41–59 Zembylas, M. (2020). Emotions, affects, and trauma in classrooms: Moving beyond the representational genre. Research in Education (Manchester), 106(1), 59–76.