Over the past decades’ higher education institutions in Western Europe have gradually become interested in incorporating critical social justice issues such as gender and sexual diversity and racial justice in their curricula (Singh 2011, Wimpenny et al. 2021). In the context of the Netherlands, the work of faculty of color, such as Philomena Essed and Gloria Wekker, has been pivotal in addressing the racialized and gendered disadvantages embedded in higher education (Essed 1991, Wekker 2009). Their scholarship has played a critical role in challenging and unsettling the entrenched norms of the ivory tower. The calls of social justice movements such as MeToo and Black Live Matters, and the Global South led activism to decolonize education, can no longer be ignored (Seckinelgin, 2023). At the same time however, neo-liberalisation poses important challenges to form collective and socio-political engagement in higher education, as individualizing approaches to academic freedom contribute to the normalization of so-called anti-woke statements in higher education, often in subtle ways (Hertoghs et al. 2024). Against this background, teaching on social justice issues in a critical and transgressive manner has found fertile ground, while facing important challenges at the same time. This paper explores these dynamics in the context of the university classroom and in the engagement between teachers and students. It builds on several years of experience with using participatory arts in our courses, inspired by critical pedagogies such as black feminist scholar bel hooks’ (hooks 1994). hooks understands teaching as a practice of freedom that should be focused on awareness raising, while connecting theory with practice and contributing to the self-actualization of students and teachers. We will offer auto-ethnographic reflections on working with Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal 2000) in particular in our respective courses on health and gender and sexuality in the University of Groningen. Our experiences suggest that using these methodologies have potential for transforming the curriculum in such ways it ‘challenges rather than reinforcing systems of domination’ to paraphrase hooks when it comes to gender and sexual diversity (hooks 1994). However, raising awareness on racial hierarchies and related cultural stereotypes and biases proves to be much more challenging. Our experiences suggest that working with theatre of the oppressed in institutions in which students (and teachers) are predominantly white, and upper middle class, may lead to reproducing rather than transforming racial injustice.

Boal, Augusto. 2000. Theater of the Oppressed. New ed. London: Pluto. Essed, P. (1999). Ethnicity and diversity in Dutch academia. Social Identities, 5(2), 211-225. Hertoghs, M., Isenia, W. J., Krebbekx, W., & Roodsaz, R. (2024). Recalcitrance and feminist pedagogy: Autoethnographic reflections on anti-gender mobilisations at the university. Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 27(2/3), 132-150. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Seckinelgin, H. (2023). Teaching social policy as if students matter: Decolonizing the curriculum and perpetuating epistemic injustice. Critical Social Policy, 43(2), 296-315. Singh, M. (2011). The place of social justice in higher education and social change discourses. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 41(4), 481–494. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2011.581515 Wekker, G. (2009). Where the girls are…’: Some hidden gendered and ethnicized aspects of higher education in The Netherlands. Thinking diversity, building cohesion: A transnational dialogue on education, 151-164. Wimpenny, K., Beelen, J., Hindrix, K., King, V., & Sjoer, E. (2021). Curriculum internationalization and the ‘decolonizing academic.’ Higher Education Research & Development, 41(7), 2490–2505. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2021.201440