This paper builds on a previous ECER contribution that examined how spaces of Danish higher education are entangled with processes of race and social class, shaping students’ embodied experiences of belonging and non-belonging (Li, 2025). The earlier paper analyzed the spaces of higher education as a space of prestige that simultaneously functions as a space of underrepresentation. For instance, entering the auditorium is shown to be a non-neutral act: through spatial arrangements, linguistic codes, and unspoken norms, students’ bodies are read, positioned, and policed, producing layered forms of exclusion across race, class, and geography (Li, 2025, Li & Hilgart, 2026 forthcoming). Building on this analysis, the present paper shifts focus from research to pedagogy, asking how knowledge produced through research on racialization—and the researcher’s own positionality in conducting such research—can be translated into teaching in higher education. Specifically, the paper explores how pedagogies of discomfort (Zembylas, 2015) can be mobilized to address the classed and racialized spaces of academia and to engage students in critical reflections on belonging, privilege, and inequality within the social sciences and humanities. Theoretically, the paper draws on feminist and critical scholarship on positionality and racial discomfort, foregrounding positioning as an ongoing, relational, and reflexive process through which educators negotiate their relationships to power, whiteness, and racialization (Zembylas, 2015, 2025). Methodologically, it draws on autoethnography and reflexive engagement with teaching and researching experiences in higher education, focusing on moments of discomfort that arise when teaching about racialized topics, bodies, and spaces (Khawaja, 2022; Vertelyte et al., 2024). The paper asks: What forms of discomfort emerge when teaching with and through research on racialization? How do racially minoritized educators navigate assumptions, emotional labor, and risks of (re)traumatization in the classroom? And how can discomfort be pedagogically channeled in ways that challenge hegemonic norms while also creating possibilities for critical hope and social transformation (Connelly & Joseph-Salisbury, 2019; Hooks, 2014)? By bringing research on racialized academic spaces into pedagogical practice, the paper contributes to sociological and feminist debates on higher education teaching, arguing that discomfort is not a pedagogical failure but a necessary condition for challenging the exclusionary logics and practices of the university.

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