Across European higher education, commitments to inclusion have expanded rapidly, yet the everyday enactment of these commitments remains uneven. A recurring dynamic in teaching, supervision, assessment, and collegial interaction is the emergence of diversity discomfort, the felt and often tacit unease that accompanies encounters with difference, contested knowledge, and unequal social positioning. This discomfort is frequently treated as noise to be managed away (through silence, proceduralism, or “neutrality”), or alternatively as evidence of individual intolerance. We propose a different starting point: diversity discomfort is an educational and organizational phenomenon that is patterned by power relations and epistemic norms, and it can either consolidate exclusion or open pathways for inclusive transformation.

This conceptual and agenda setting paper asks: Under what conditions does diversity discomfort in higher education operate as an exclusionary mechanism, and under what conditions can it be pedagogically and institutionally mobilised to support inclusion? We pursue three objectives. First, we clarify diversity discomfort as a multi level construct that spans affect (emotion), cognition (meaning making), and relational positioning (recognition and credibility). Second, we map key theoretical traditions that illuminate how discomfort is produced and distributed across institutional life. Third, we develop a forward looking research agenda and set of conceptual propositions to guide empirical work and professional practice.

We conceptualise diversity discomfort as exclusionary when it becomes attached to routinised defensive practices, including avoidance of “difficult” content, discrediting of minority testimony, depoliticised appeals to academic objectivity, and the normalization of microaggressions through institutional inaction. These dynamics connect to scholarship on epistemic injustice and willful ignorance (Pohlhaus, 2012), and to accounts of how institutional norms protect historically dominant groups, often through seemingly benign procedures (Ahmed, 2017; DiAngelo, 2018; Wang, 2005).

Simultaneously, a distinct body of scholarship suggests that discomfort can function as a productive educational condition when it is accompanied by pedagogical structure, ethical safeguards, and reflective attention. We bring four strands into dialogue. First, feminist and poststructural accounts treat discomfort as a signal that habitual modes of perception are being interrupted, creating an opening for critical self interrogation and responsibility (Foucault, 1994; Haraway, 2016; Chadwick, 2021; Ahmed, 2017). Second, learning theories conceptualise stretch as intrinsic to development, while cautioning that challenge can tip into panic without appropriate scaffolding (Vygotsky, 1978; Senninger, 2000). Third, work on safe and brave spaces reframes the goal as neither comfort nor confrontation, but conditions for engaged disagreement alongside protection of dignity (Arao and Clemens, 2013; Callan, 2020). Fourth, pedagogy of discomfort foregrounds emotions as central to social justice learning, while insisting that educators must navigate the ethical risk of harm, including the possibility of ethical violence in the name of transformation (Boler, 1999; Berlak, 2004; Boler and Zembylas, 2003; Zembylas and McGlynn, 2012; Zembylas, 2015).

By reframing diversity discomfort as a site where inclusion is negotiated, not merely a hindrance to be removed, the paper outlines conceptual propositions and a research agenda aimed at understanding how European HEIs can cultivate practices that convert defensive discomfort into reflective engagement, without normalising harm or offloading emotional costs onto minoritised participants.

This is a conceptual paper that draws on a narrative review and iterative expert sensemaking to develop a differentiated framework for analysing diversity discomfort in European higher education. We conducted a narrative review using search terms spanning diversity and inclusion, discomfort, epistemic injustice, safe and brave spaces, learning zones, and pedagogy of discomfort. Rather than aiming for exhaustive coverage, we focused on identifying conceptual mechanisms, points of tension, and recurring explanatory patterns across literatures. The review was organised in iterative cycles of mapping, clustering, and theorising. First, we mapped how discomfort is defined, located (individual, relational, institutional), and morally evaluated (problem, signal, necessity) across distinct traditions. Second, we clustered insights into four analytic strands (politics of discomfort, learning zone accounts, safe and brave space scholarship, pedagogy of discomfort) and examined how each strand treats power, vulnerability, agency, and pedagogical responsibility. Third, through a series of expert meetings, we tested the coherence and portability of the emerging framework across European institutional contexts, including universities and universities of applied sciences. The outcome of this approach is a set of conceptual propositions and an empirically tractable research agenda. In particular, we specify how discomfort is shaped by institutional norms of neutrality and merit, by epistemic hierarchies concerning whose knowledge is credited, and by pedagogical designs that either contain uncertainty or use it as a resource. These propositions are intended to guide qualitative and mixed method studies on classroom interaction, curriculum choices, staff development, and institutional policy enactment.

The paper contributes (1) a reframed conceptualisation of diversity discomfort as a multi level phenomenon shaped by power and epistemic norms, (2) a set of propositions to help distinguish exclusionary discomfort (defensive, displacing, silencing) from generative discomfort (structured, dialogic, accountable), and (3) a research agenda for European higher education. The research agenda is organised around four questions: How is diversity discomfort produced and normalised through everyday pedagogical and institutional practices? What conditions enable discomfort to support learning, dialogue, and inclusion rather than avoidance or harm? What forms of scaffolding, facilitation, and institutional accountability are required to prevent the offloading of emotional labour onto minoritised participants? How do these dynamics vary across European contexts, disciplines, and institutional types? We also foreground three dilemmas. First, educators must calibrate challenge so that learners and teachers remain within a viable learning zone. Second, efforts to “stay with discomfort” must address the ethical risk of harm and the possibility of ethical violence (Butler, 2005; Zembylas, 2015). Third, the current organisational climate of efficiency and constraint can push inclusion work toward procedural compliance, undermining the slow practices of reflexivity and relational repair required for meaningful change (Ghorashi, 2014).

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