How can education respond constructively to minoritized students’ experiences? As we know from international research, students’ racial-ethnic classed and gendered experiences (feelings, moods and practices that occur due to one’s minority positioning), and educators’ ways of dealing with them, are pertinent factors in educational institutions and critical diversity pedagogies (Zembylas & McGlynn 2012; Zembylas, 2015). We also know that diversity work which creates inclusive environments that are accepting of differences and provide equal opportunities has a profound effect on learning outcomes, motivation and well-being among students, in particular minority students. Since racial-ethnic and intersectional experiences play such a decisive role, there is an urgent need to develop pedagogies that address these experiences in constructive ways (Vertelyte & Staunæs, 2022).

Based on the argument that diversity work is also ‘mood work’ (Ahmed, 2014), the symposium focuses on the collective atmospheres and individual feelings, that channel and circumscribe the processes through which racial-ethnic and gendered experiences become invested. These moods emerge for instance, when students encounter and negotiate racially charged humour as funny or offensive; when white teachers or majority students are confused and hurt by being called racist by other students; when being a minority student ‘feels like being a problem’ (Du Bois, 1903/2019); or when minority students’ experiences of racial and ethnic exclusion are met with skepticism. Considering that diversity work is often mood work and felt differently by differently positioned people (Ahmed, 2014), and generations of people, in this symposium we draw on new feminist materialisms (Barad 2010) and affects studies (Ahmed 2014; Wetherell 2012) and address how exactly racialized, classed and gendered moods are formed  as part of educational encounters and how they are dealt with by students and educators (Petersen & Millei, 2016; Reay 2013; Staunæs & Juelskjær 2016; Walkerdine 2021; Zembylas 2015).

In this symposium, we aim to explore how emotions and collective moods shape and constitute diversity work across different educational and national contexts: higher education in Australia, kindergarten teacher education and high schools in Norway, and high schools in Denmark. The papers deal with affective issues relevant to questions of inclusion and intersectional forms of diversity in educational settings. In the symposium, we explore how the vocabulary of everyday diversity work may take affective generational shapes and how different generations have varied ways of comprehending and approaching their common day language around diversity (Paper 1: Staunæs and Vertelyte); how the silence on issues of social class in diversity and equity policy shape the feelings of belonging in the academia of early career researchers in Australian universities (Paper 2: Maree Martinussen); how racialized moods in Norwegian kindergarten teacher education may transform and shape critical approaches to pedagogies (Paper 3: Camilla Eline Andersen and Agnes Westgaard Bjelkerud); and how staff at Norwegian schools negotiate understandings of racism and coordinate practices on and against it (Paper 4: Christine Lillethun Norheim and Rebecca W. B. Lund). Putting the four papers in conversation, we aim to discuss what is common and different when we look at diversity work as mood work across different educational contexts of European/Nordic welfare states, as the perspectives from Australian contexts allow us to discuss what is distinctively European or Nordic. This discussion is brought further by the discussant Zsuzsanna Millei, who’s research includes both Nordic and Australian contexts. Moreover, we aim to discuss how different moods are constituted in relation to different diversity categories (such as social class, race, ethnicity, gender) and across different national educational contexts; and finally what are the methodological ways to explore diversity work as exactly mood work.

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