This paper responds directly to the ECER 2026 theme Knowing and Acting: The changing conditions and potentials of education research by advancing a critical racial and decolonial literacy framework as an urgent, praxis-oriented intervention in contemporary educational research and pedagogy. Drawing on the conceptual foundations and collective scholarship articulated in Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies (Bargallie & Fernando, 2024), the paper argues that education research cannot meaningfully “act” without first confronting the enduring racial–colonial conditions that shape what is known, whose knowledge counts, and how educational institutions reproduce or resist white supremacy.

Situated in the settler racial–colonial context of Australia, the paper addresses the persistent silencing, denial, and obfuscation of race and racism within education systems, particularly preservice teacher education, and research cultures. Despite the proliferation of diversity, inclusion, Indigenisation, and decolonisation discourses across universities and schools, race itself remains marginalised, euphemised, or rendered unspeakable. This silencing is not accidental; rather, it is constitutive of liberal multicultural and neoliberal governance frameworks that individualise racism and foreclose structural critique. Within these conditions, education research risks becoming complicit in reproducing racial ignorance, even as it claims commitments to equity and social justice.

It provides educators and researchers with the conceptual language to identify how race operates as a governing technology for the management of human difference Lentin, 2020). Such a language can name experiences of racism that are often normalised or denied, and to interrogate how educational institutions are structured through racial–colonial logics.

Crucially, the paper distinguishes critical racial literacy from depoliticised institutional approaches to anti-racism, such as unconscious bias training, cultural competency frameworks, or surface-level curriculum reforms. These approaches, while often presented as evidence of institutional action, typically remain anchored in white analytic frames and neoliberal individualism. They leave intact the structural conditions of racial domination and epistemic racism that marginalise Indigenous and racialised scholars and constrain what kinds of knowledge can be produced within education research Whatman & McLaughlin, 2024). In contrast, critical racial and decolonial literacies insist that action must be oriented toward dismantling the systems, structures, and epistemologies that sustain racial inequality.

Drawing on examples from across disciplines and educational spaces, the paper illustrates how educators and researchers enact critical racial literacy in practice, often from the margins of institutions that are hostile to explicit engagements with race. These enactments include decolonial pedagogies that centre Indigenous sovereignty, critical interrogations of canonical knowledge, affective and embodied approaches to teaching about race, creative and artistic interventions, and dialogical practices grounded in solidarity (Brooks, 2024), care, and refusal. Collectively, these practices demonstrate that education research is not only a site of knowledge production but also a terrain of struggle, where scholars must navigate backlash, risk, and institutional constraint.

The paper mobilises critical racial literacy (Bargallie & Fernando, 2024) as a decolonial anti-racist praxis that bridges knowing and acting. Grounded in critical race theory, critical Indigenous studies, Blak/Black feminist thought, and decolonial scholarship, critical racial literacy is conceptualised not as a set of skills or competencies, but as an ongoing, collective, and contested practice of learning, unlearning, refusal, and resistance. Data was collected from teacher educators following Bessarub and Ng'andu's (2010) yarning methodology: "Yarning in a semi-structured interview is an informal and relaxed discussion through which both the researcher and participant journey together visiting places and topics of interest relevant to the research study. Yarning is a process that requires the researcher to develop and build a relationship that is accountable to Indigenous people participating in the research" (p.38).

The paper concludes that the changing conditions of education research—marked by culture wars, attacks on critical race scholarship, and the co-optation of decolonial language—make the articulation of a critical racial and decolonial liberatory imperative especially urgent. As race-critical scholarship is increasingly diluted, sanitised, or driven underground, the potential of education research to contribute to emancipatory social change is at stake. Acting, in this context, requires more than methodological innovation or policy relevance; it requires an explicit political and ethical commitment to confronting white supremacy and coloniality within education itself. In alignment with the ECER theme, the paper proposes that knowing and acting are inseparable within critical racial and decolonial literacy praxis. Knowing is not neutral or abstract but produced through situated struggles over power, recognition, and legitimacy. Acting is not an optional extension of research but a responsibility that emerges from understanding how education systems are implicated in ongoing racial harm. The paper concludes by positioning critical racial and decolonial literacies as vital to reimagining the conditions and potentials of education research in Europe, Australia, and other settler and postcolonial contexts. By foregrounding solidarity, refusal, and critical hope, it calls on education researchers to move beyond symbolic inclusion and toward transformative action that actively works against the racial–colonial conditions of the present.

Bargallie, D., & Fernando, N. (2024). Introduction. In D. Bargallie & N. Fernando (Eds). Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies Breaking the Silence. Bristol University Press Bessarab, D., & Ng’andu, B. (2010). Yarning About Yarning as a Legitimate Method in Indigenous Research. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3(1), 37-50. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcis.v3i1.57. Brooks, A. (2024).Teaching Race, Conceptualizing Solidarity. In D. Bargallie & N. Fernando (Eds).Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies Breaking the Silence. Bristol University Press. Lentin, A. (2020). Why Race Still Matters. Polity Press. Whatman, S., & McLaughlin, J.M. (2024). Racially Literate Teacher Education: (Im)Possibilities for Disrupting the Racial Silence. In D. Bargallie & N. Fernando (Eds).Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies Breaking the Silence. Bristol University Press.