This symposium explores how race, positionality, and positioning shape educational research and pedagogy, with particular attention to predominantly White educational spaces in Europe. Drawing on critical race theory (Yosso 2023), black feminist scholarship (Ladson-billing 2003), and critical pedagogies (hooks 1995; Freire 2021), the panel addresses a persistent challenge in educational research: how to meaningfully engage with racialized power relations in research and teaching without reducing positionality to static identity statements or reproducing race-evasive practices.

While positionality has become a common feature in educational research, emerging scholarship questions whether positionality statements alone are sufficient for addressing racism as an epistemic, methodological, and pedagogical issue (Zembylas, 2025). Building on this critique, the symposium foregrounds positioning as an ongoing, reflexive, and relational process through which researchers and educators actively negotiate their relationships to systems of power, whiteness, and racialization over time (Zembylas, 2025).

The symposium explores what educational research and reflections on positionality can contribute to the development of critical and feminist pedagogies of race—and what needs to be brought from research into the classroom.

Theoretical and Conceptual Framing

The symposium is grounded in feminist and critical traditions that conceptualize positionality not as a fixed identity but as relational, contextual, and historically produced (Misawa, 2010). Feminist scholars have long emphasized reflexivity and positionality as central to both research and teaching. Yet, tensions remain between Freirean critical pedagogy—where oppression is often conceptualized in structural and binary terms—and feminist poststructuralist understandings of positionality as multiple and shifting (Weiler, 2001). Freire’s emphasis on situationality and critical consciousness remains influential for social justice education, however constructivist pedagogies risk individualizing and essentializing positionality if they fail to historicize knowledge and the systems of reasoning through which subjects come to know.

Recent work further complicates these debates by highlighting how racialized researchers experience positionality differently across contexts, particularly when researching racism within education (Gobena et al., 2025). This includes how others’ perceptions of race shape research encounters, ethical relations, and pedagogical authority—especially in Nordic and European contexts marked by persistent claims of innocence from colonialism and racism.

This symposium addresses the following interrelated themes:

• Positioning vs. positionality: What does it mean to move from static positionality statements to forward-looking, action-oriented practices of positioning in educational research (Zembylas, 2025)?
• Research informed teaching: How can such research practices inspire teaching in higher education? What do students trained in white institutions need to transgress (hooks 1994) and decenter whiteness?
• Pedagogy and change: How can insights from research on positionality and racialization be translated into pedagogical practices that move beyond describing conditions of racism toward actively transforming them?

By combining descriptive analyses of racialized conditions in education with pedagogical commitments to change, this symposium responds to calls for racially-just ecologies of knowledge, shaped by epistemologies and methodologies that challenge dominating knowledge systems while embracing the principle of incompleteness of knowledge (Santos 2014). It foregrounds the ethical, methodological, and pedagogical implications of race and positionality, particularly for scholars and students navigating liminal or minoritized positions within academia.

The symposium contributes to the Social Justice Education network by offering theoretically grounded and empirically informed reflections on how positioning can function as a critical pedagogical practice—one that historicizes knowledge, disrupts whiteness, and fosters solidarities oriented toward social action.

Freire, P. (2021). Education for critical consciousness. Bloomsbury Academic. Gobena, E. B., Dickstein, J. D., Zeleke, G., & Dansholm, K. K. (2025). Beyond ’Where do you really come from?’: Rethinking positionality and racial dynamics in Nordic exceptionalism. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 16(1). hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. Ladson-Billings, G. (2003). Critical race theory perspectives on the social studies: the profession, policies, and curriculum. Information Age Pub. Misawa, M., (2010) “Queer Race Pedagogy for Educators in Higher Education: Dealing with Power Dynamics and Positionality of LGBTQ Students of Color”, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3(1). Santos, B.D.S., (2014). Epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide. 1st ed. Oxon: Routledge. Weiler, K. (Ed.). (2001). Feminist Engagements: Reading, Resisting, and Revisioning Male Theorists in Education and Cultural Studies (1st ed.). Routledge. Yosso, T. J., & García, D. G. (2023). Carving out a legal narrative from Galarza to Soria: Accounting for the complexities of history, race, and place in educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 36(1), 9–25. Zembylas, M. (2025). Rethinking positionality statements in research: from looking back to building solidarity. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 48(5), 466–478.