Schools can be important sites for advancing peoples ability to build respectful relationships with one another, especially when the students come from diverse backgrounds (Schwarzenthal et al., 2020). However, the presence of diverse students in the environment does not alone lead to realizing competence but can lead to either positive, or in the worst case, negative attitudes towards diversity (Schmid et al., 2014; Schwarzenthal et al., 2020). Thus, there is a need to study how students in a diverse school position themselves in relation to rights of minoritized people which is the central aim of this study. Additionally, an aim of this research is to bring awareness to educators, researchers and practitioners involved in education and policy, in order to create counter educational opportunities to challenge problematic LGBT+ narratives that are now omnipresent throughout online social media content and quickly filtering into the contemproary Finnish school environment.  

While there have been enermous gains regarding the rights of LGBT+ in previous decades in Finland and accross most Western contexts, there clearly remains more work to be done in education for social justice in order for people to interact in a way that avoids deficit perspectives (Mikander et al., 2018; Sleeter, 2014). Despite the growing awareness of minority rights for inclusion there remains at the same time exclusion and stigmatization of LGBT+ (Vijlbrief et al., 2019; Rosen & Nofziger). Studies show that LGBT+ youth are significantly more likely to experience higher levels of exclusion and higher levels of victimization (Birkett et al., 2009). Additionally, experiences of discrimination at school has increaingly been shown to be grounded in hegemonic masculinity, predicated on heterosexuality, physical dominance, normalization of violence and how gender intersects with other social locations such as ethnicity and social class (Rosen & Nofziger, 2019). Therefore, there is a clear need for active work against inequalities (Freire, 1973) through questinong power relations that hegemonic norms might produce (Alemanji, 2016; Hoskins & Sallah, 2011). 

As difference is increasingly accepted in the mainstream, it seems that division is becoming more polarized at the extreme ends of the debate. Amid strong gains made by women's movements and social movements, a counter-revolution has emerged, one with no finite geographical or national boundaries, which is truly global in its reach - an epitome of technological globalization. The push back against now dominant mainstream narratives surrounding rights and justice comes from outside of the status-quo, from fringe actors who exploit fears and anxieties, capitalizing on male alienation, and bolstering a male victimhood narrative. Masculinities, understood as hegemonic (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005), are ordered as such by creating symbolic value associated with dominant masculinities over subordinated ones. In other words, those reproducing and embodying hergemonc masculinity seem to be less suseptible to discrimination and exclusion. It is therefore important to provide education for social justice which could enable students’ mutual positive attitudes and the absence of discrimination in the surrounding context (Hoskins & Sallah, 2011), which could support the well-being of students from diverse background (Yeasmin & Uusiautti 2018).

Thus, there is a need to take a critical stance and go beyond simply getting along and instead focus on structural inequalities and overcoming inequities inherent in current social structures that marginalize non-dominant students and systematically prevent them from achieving their full potential (see e.g. Mikander et al., 2018). Hence, this study will investigate how students negotiate inequalties and the rights of minoritized people in the Finnish lower secondary environment, and how do they position themselves in relation to sexual and gendered "othereness".

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Data for this study was collected in Autumn 2022 using semi-structured group-interviews. The participants (N= 55) were diverse students, 15-16 years old, from two different schools in Finland.The students came from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. The data was collected during English classes. All the students and their guardians were informed about the study by sending them a letter including the purpose of the study, information on the interviews, the ethical procedures and the possibility either to participate or not in the study. In the group-interviews, there were 4 – 6 students and 2 interviewers in each group. The discussions were recorded and then transcribed by one of the researchers. Up to this point, the transcribed data were used for a content-driven thematic analysis, however the subsequent phase will implement a discourse analysis. To code the data, author 2 read the responses to gain an initial understanding of the data and identify sub-categories for coding the data. Author 1 used NVivo software to make initial codes. The suggested categories were then discussed among authors 1 and 2; categories were decided upon. Categories relevant to this research paper that arose from the data were (1) belonging, (2) school climate, (3) social justice; (4) LGBT+ (5) Gender (6) identity. The more exact coding as well as discourse analysis will be presented and discussed during the presentation. .

The preliminary findings of this study indicates that there are polarized positions in relation to sexual and gendered "othereness". Some of the students interviewed were openly telling how they do not accept LGBT+ issues in any form, and they also questioned the relevancy of the freedom and rights to gender and sexuality minority expression. On the contrary, those who identified themselves as belonging to the LGBT+ community were highly supportive of unilateral social justice, regardless of their backgrounds. They also reported that they had experienced discrimination and that they implemented strategies to conceal parts of their identity in order not to be victimized. In some cases, students spoke of how the perpetrators of discrimination justified their behaviors on the basis of their religious values, counter to non hetero normative behavior. Paradoxically, students who identified themselves as LGBT+ spoke about how physical environment, in the form of providing gender neutral facilities, created a safe space for them to allow them to express their identity in a more suitable, desirable fashion whereas their social environment threatened their identities.In short, physical environment was supportive, yet the social environment was not. This research, after thoroughly examining the data, expects to find that hegemonic masculinity remains an important deterministic factor in social reproduction, one which promotes status elevation at a cost of discrimination against minority categories. This study provides valuable insights on how to target education for social justice which may be applicable to many contemporary school environments in the age of technological globalization, where the students with superdiverse backgrounds encounter each other, in a context of increasing political constestations in the arena of political rights.

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