The world is shaken by multiple crises like accumulating natural disasters, global pandemics and reactive social forces as indicated by the increase of extremist right-wing populism. Not only do they lead to an exacerbation of social inequalities, they also raise attention to the fact that individual and collective futures are constantly at stake. Certainties have become a rare good, especially for those who suffer the most from discriminatory discourse like racism, sexism, nationalism, heteronormativity or classism. Still, schools continue to be a central arena for conveying certainty: They follow the meritocratic principle and thus make subjects believe that they will be successful in education through performance, and can secure long-term social and societal integration (Hadjar & Becker 2016). Subjects fall prey to this neoliberal promise of being able to belong in school and society if you just try hard enough (Davies & Bansel 2007). However, it becomes apparent that sexism and racism thwart the promise of equal opportunities at school and make it more of an illusion than a lived reality (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977; Phoenix 2005, Youdell 2006). Consequently, subjects are thrown back on their social positioning, no matter how meticulously they try to conform with meritocratic principles.

In our paper, we use biographies to tackle the question of how subjects in deprivileged social positions negotiate the meritocratic illusion they encounter in school. We assume that biographies can not only demonstrate how students are affected by and suffer from powerful structures, but how they “work” with these, in e.g. resisting, complying, and often contradictory ways. To conceptualize how subjects submit to powerful discourses like meritocracy, but also racism and sexism, we use Judith Butler’s concept of subjectivation (Butler 1997). According to Butler, subjects are not pre-given entities but are constantly produced in and through powerful discourses: Individuals are subjected through discursive interpellations (Althusser 1971) which address them to develop a sense of the self as somebody in the world in relation to others. However, subjects in privileged positions can often perceive themselves as sovereign agents, while subjects that experience racist or sexist interpellations over and over again, as observed in the school context (Chadderton 2018; Youdell 2006), might struggle with the construction of a stable self. Therefore, the possibilities to conceive of oneself as a (more or less) stable, certain, sovereign subject encountering safe and certain spaces within one’s biography are distributed very unequally among individuals and vary widely according to one’s position inside the power relations of society.

By the example of two case studies in two different national school contexts (Turkey and Germany), we ask for the production of certainties in biographies of marginalized subjects. Both of them refer to biographies of women with “successful” educational pathways despite the fact that they are marginalized along discourses of race and gender. On the basis of excerpts from two biographical interviews, we seek to show how students engage with the meritocratic principle performed in education to “work” on their belonging to collectives defined along the lines of race and gender. Particularly with regard to experiences of discrimination, it becomes clear how the belief in school performance (in)ability is intertwined with race and gender norms in this affiliation work. We will focus on different ways in which subjects attempt to create certainty of action by adapting to hegemonic norms. By understanding the desire to comply with social norms as a way of future-making, we ask both for the biographical functions as well as for the subjectivating effects of these practices.

We combine biographical research (Breckner 2015; Dausien 2002; Rosenthal 1993) with the perspective of subjectivation. This enables us to look at past subjectivation processes and to analyse how subject positions are “made” by also considering the interview situation itself as structured by power relations. Hence, we focus in our analysis on how subjects are positioned and negotiate belonging in terms of race and gender and on the interlinkage of these positionings to past, present and (imagined) futures (Anthias 2002; Phoenix 2005; Yuval-Davis 2006). By cultivating a sense of the temporal dimension (Facer 2023) of biographies, this perspective allows us to explore the making and unmaking of certainty within education biographies in its social and temporal complexity (Dausien 2002). “Narrating” a biography as situated practice interlink the past with the present and the future, imagining past experiences and visions of the future from a present perspective (Rosenthal 1993). Thus, biographies can be analysed as a mode for marginalized subjects to anchor themselves in an ever-unstable world as well as uncertain future, which allows them – contrary to their experiences in many every-day contexts – to be the constructors of their own story. The empirical data stem from distinct qualitative projects which have taken place in Turkey and Germany. They rely on biographical interviews (Schütze 1983) with female subjects marginalized along the lines of race inside national society and education in highly politicized and contested contexts. More precisely, we present an interview of a young woman in Istanbul positioning herself as Kurdish and recounting her experiences in the Turkish nationalistic schooling system. We compare this example to an interview with a young woman of color in Germany, who shares her experiences of discrimination as well as her ways of coping with them. We analyze passages in which the narrators speak about their ambitions to be successful students and fulfil norms of schooling performance and the ways they link this to social norms of race and gender. This demonstrates how subjects seek to create an illusionary certainty in school referring to meritocratic norms, and highlight practices of attempted immunization against marginalization. The comparative nature of our analysis allows us to scrutinize practices of negotiation and resistance to powerful social norms as well as to discuss how the biographies refer to hegemonic discourses in the respective national, social and political contexts.

Overall, the paper contributes to the debate on how racist and sexist inequalities are reproduced and challenged in different yet comparable social and national contexts as well as to the interplay of biographies, future imaginations and the political play in the production of (un-)certainties. As the two case studies will show in particular, the narrations point to practices of self-optimization, which focus on one's inner and outer self (school performance, good grades, appropriate behaviour, hair and clothing). Despite critique towards discrimination, the women do not necessarily overcome deficient self-images as an effect of experiences of discrimination. The case study comparison points to different modes of establishing certainty, where the illusion of sovereignty over one's own educational path helps to deal with these experiences. In the end, meritocracy will be deconstructed and thereby criticized as a shared belief in education: The subjective efforts to create certainty, predictability and stability in education, is illusory as well as it is functional: It is functional because it contributes to the creation of certainty of action and also to being able to imagine oneself as a subject with a place in the world. It remains illusionary insofar as it is linked to the – mostly disappointed – hope that the attempt to rid oneself of the characteristics that are marked as flaws in racist and sexist discourses is linked to the abolition of the discriminatory structures on which these discourses are based.

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