Although racialized hierarchies are understood as dynamic and shifting, positionality statements often remain static. As a PhD student, I have experienced unease when requests narrow my position to racial categorization. Complying with such requests by stating my non-white position within Sweden’s racial regime may appear straightforward. However, my reluctance to acquire what Zembylas (2025) term authorizing “certificates” reflects the risk of reifying racial categories without unsettling underlying power dynamics (Gani & Khan, 2024). This presentation explores how autobiographical reflections function as a site for theorizing and re experiencing racialized power relations by positioning personal experience as an active analytic resource (hooks, 1994) within collective efforts to challenge racism. As inherently partial and messy narrative acts, such reflections offer critical alternatives to imagined pure identities (Fang, 2019; Kerr, 2024) by approaching subjectivity not as fixed but as relational and dynamic. Drawing on relational psychoanalytic theories, subjectivity is understood as a micro context in which inner life is intertwined with, yet irreducible to, sociohistorical conditions (Layton, 2020), shaped by social power structures as well as by unconscious processes, desires, and the reciprocal shaping of inner and outer worlds (Farhadi, 2019). Empirically, the presentation draws on my PhD project where I held repeated small group interviews with lower-secondary students about racism in school and collaborated with teachers adopting an action research approach to deepen our collective understanding of racism and strengthen teachers’ counteracting capacity. A third strand of the project consisted of my ongoing analytical-reflexive engagement with own experiences of racism and how they shaped the research process. During my interpretive practice, working across interview transcripts, literature, and autobiographical material, I began to theorize Swedishness, often conflated with whiteness, as a potential bad object for me and some of the participants. Drawing on Fairbairn (1952), who describes a bad object as an internalized relational figure that is simultaneously desired and experienced as rejecting or threatening, and building on Kerr’s (2024) expansion of the concept, Swedishness emerged as a desired yet unattainable object – one we could critique intellectually yet continued to seek affectively, and sometimes unconsciously. I propose that autobiographical reflection, when integrated with both abstract and context bound theorizing within an explicit anti racist ambition, can support meaningful changes in practice rather than merely reshaping declarations.

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