Drawing on auto-ethnographic reflection, the paper explores positioning as a dynamic process shaped through interactions with racialized students and white colleagues within a predominantly white higher education institution. Two interconnected observations guide the analysis. First, racialized students and lecturers are routinely positioned as carrying the labor of diversity and inclusion, encountering simultaneously white fragility, claims of neutrality and institutional resistance. Second, the research process of the first author revealed how different aspects of her positioning became salient at different moments, enabling research relationships, knowledge production and pedagogical possibilities. Interactions with students made visible what students educated in a University of Applied Sciences need to transgress in order to decenter whiteness. This includes dominant epistemic norms, affective investments and assumptions of innocence. At the same time, engagement with colleague lecturers exposed how whiteness operates as an institutional logic that shapes what counts as legitimate knowledge, pedagogy and critique. Theoretically, the lens of Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso 2005) foregrounds the relational, experiential and cultural resources that racialized students and teachers bring into the educational spaces and that can be mobilized toward institutional change. By reconceptualizing positioning as process rather than positionality as a fixed attribute, this paper contributes to the overall focus on pedagogy and change in the symposium. It argues that reflexive, positioning-aware teaching and policies can move beyond describing racism toward actively transforming it. Doing so, makes the limits and tensions of such work within white institutions visible.

Yosso *, T. J. 2005. Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. doi:10.1080/1361332052000341006