Calls from feminist and anti-racist scholars to question and critique dominant theories and methodologies have received little institutional support in the social sciences (Rizvi 2022). While higher educational institutions now teach students to reflect on their positionality, for example when writing their thesis, positionality statements tend to be performative rather than grounded in an evolving reflexivity and awareness of one’s own positioning (Zembylas 2025). This has particular consequences for awareness of racialization. While students’ awareness of sexual and gender inequalities in everyday life has increased over the past decade (Hertoghs et al. 2024), white students have limited experiences that motivate them to question the pretense of neutrality in their racialized positioning. As a consequence, awareness of racialization remains limited or not considered relevant in a white educational space, while the burden of educating white students heavily falls on the shoulders of students and teachers with racialized and minoritized positioning (Verteleyte et al. 2024, Wekker forthcoming). Inspired by critical whiteness studies (Rizvi 2022), this paper explores what ‘a critical pedagogy of positioning’ could look like in classrooms were racism is often ‘an elephant in the room’ (Verteleyte et al. 2024). Inspired by a critical phenomenological approach (Mattingly 2019) that guides much of my own research on religion, gender and sexuality as a white scholar in predominantly black contexts (e.g. East Africa and the African diaspora in Europe), I set out to develop a pedagogical approach to teaching on religion/race, gender and sexuality. In translating anthropological insights on positioning to pedagogy, I drew on bel hooks’ (1998) transgressive pedagogy and Augusto Boals’ Theatre of the Oppressed. In this paper I will auto-ethnographically reflect on my own teaching. I will argue that foregrounding the experiential while engaging with the moral and political is important for ‘a critical pedagogy of positioning’ (Mattingly 2019). However, while engaging with the experiential emerges as a powerful source for reflexivity related to positioning (Verteleyte et al. 2024), it remains challenging to unsettle fixed understandings of religion/race in predominantly white institutions for higher education (e.g. Mahmood 2011, Rizvi 2022).

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