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no. 13_april 2022

On Education

editorial: how racism works: systemic injustices and the (false) promises of education

In the 13th issue of On Education we are interested in analyses of `how racism works´ in and through education. We engage with the heated debate on the role that educational institutions and practices as well as educational knowledge production in academia play in counteracting as well as distributing and diffusing racism. It examines the entanglements of education and racism by focusing on at least four areas of interest: (1) historical and epistemological racism in educational knowledge production, (2) the relationship between race and power in educational institutions, policies and practices, (3) the consequences of racism and whiteness in the (educational) lives of Black and Minority Ethnic people (BME) as well as (4) the promises and pitfalls of countering racism in education.

Thomas Geier

racism and discursive belongings

This paper is based on the assumption that migration movements irritate the orders of belonging associated with and produced by symbolic, structural, legal, and territorial borders. In the discourses accompanying such crises, these crises themselves become thematic in a certain way and can thus be understood and contextualized. In their thematization, solutions to the respective crises are also presented as desirable. In this sense, they can also be understood in terms of their contribution to a (European) subjectivation. Discourses have the quality of education insofar as they convey world and self-relations by means of which individuals can (learn to) understand themselves as subjects. In the field of migration, discourses are connected with symbolic orders of belonging, which are often closely related to racisms.

Birte Schröder and Inken Carstensen-Egwuom

the planetary justice crisis, structural racism and sustainability education

We follow two main arguments in our contribution: First, we contend that there is a vital need to connect theories around racism to discussions about the Planetary Ecological Crisis. This is a link that has hardly been addressed in German-speaking social science research on racism. And secondly, we argue for a critical engagement with the workings of racism within Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), an educational field with a strongly normative underpinning that (cl)aims to work for a “better future for all”. Questions on how the futurity inherent in this claim and the divisions within the “all” have colonial and racist underpinnings are imperative for an engagement with ESD.

Julian Ernst

digital counter speech and reactance: critical potentials for teaching about racism

Digital counter speech has become an element of the task of educating about racism, aiming to promote critical engagement with racism and hateful discourses on the internet. However, addressees of the pedagogical efforts often show affective-defensive reactions towards the applied counter speech: reactance. Whereas the occurrence of reactance can be considered an obstacle to educational processes, from a subjectivation-theoretical perspective this essay aims to shed light on its potentials for teaching about racism: to reflexively approach the entanglement of one’s own subjectivity and that of others in powerful discourses of racism.

Jason Arday

the black professoriate: assessing the landscape within British higher education

The paucity of Black higher education professors within the United Kingdom (UK) illuminates the systemic inequity of the higher education system within Britain. The dearth of Black Professors within the professoriate in UK Higher Education (HE) is reflective of the racially discriminatory landscape. This paper offers a succinct synthesis of recent evidence in relation to assessing how the Academy systemically marginalizes Black academics from the professoriate in the UK. This paper highlights the need for the sector to mobilize greater opportunities for Black academics to progress throughout the Academy to the professoriate, in addition to challenging the sector and HE policy-makers to play more of a pivotal role in advancing ethnic equality in UK universities.

Karim Fereidooni

critical race theory in political education

This article addresses the question of how the critical race theory can be anchored in school political education and what conditions must be created for this. For this purpose, the first step is to look at the critical race theory as an analytical tool, before focusing on which student and teacher competencies critical race theory can promote.

Marko Pecak

Romani Holocaust education: what is the actual influence on students’ attitudes?

Roma continue not only to be discriminated against and to experience racist-motivated violence. Past and present racist violence and trauma that Roma experience are largely devalued by societies in Europe today. Knowing that education plays a key role in the development of intergroup relations and the development of students’ identities, the question emerges: what is the role of educational discourses on Roma in the development of social attitudes that devalue the violence and trauma experienced by Roma individuals and communities? In this essay, I pose this question and outline existing studies that could provide us with some answers as well as with avenues for further research.

Christina Brüning and Ruth Hunstock

collective amnesia and continuous anti-black racism in Germany: how the colonial past, and a reluctance to come to terms with it, causes daily difficulties and why historical learning alone does not help. an essay.

The colonial past and the postcolonial present are still marginalized topics in Germany. Our school system, universities, teacher education, but also general society and government decisions are all complicit in this. In our essay, we discuss some very recent examples to show how current racism against Black People and People of Colour (BPoC) in Germany is connected to the past that we have not dealt with.

Albert Scherr

how racism works – and how it doesn’t work: why a totalizing understanding of racism is insufficient for theory and research

This article calls for a differentiated discussion of different forms of discrimination and racism. The reason for this is that a totalizing understanding of racism, which claims a comprehensive racist structuring of society, fails to recognize the complexity and contradictory nature of social conditions and relations. In connection with this, the question must be raised whether a critique of racism that claims for itself the position of a radical critique of contemporary societies is more appropriately to be understood as an expression of a social transformation in which racism is no longer suitable as an ideological basis for the production and legitimation of economic inequalities and political power relations.

Heidi Safia Mirza

a short history of ‘race’ in British schools: a 75-year timeline

This graphic timeline reveals the story of Race in British schools as it unfolds from the 1950 post war period of post-colonial migration and settlement to the present-day aftermath of the 2020s Post-Covid Pandemic. Spanning 75 years, this unique mapping charts the changing social and political context of Race-relations which shaped the British educational response to Black and Brown children in hitherto White classrooms. Decade by decade from the 1950s onwards, the analysis examines how and why specific Race and Ethnic policy discourses evolved such as Multiculturalism in 1980s, Institutional Racism in 2000s and Decolonisation in 2015. It situates the deep national racial and religious fears that fueled controversial policies such as the bussing of Caribbean pupils and PREVENT aimed at the surveillance of Muslim communities’ post 9/11. Furthermore, it situates the historical roots of established approaches such as EDI (Equality Diversity and Inclusion) which we take for granted today. The article concludes by coming full circle exposing the entrenched intersectional Race and class inequalities which the Covid19 Pandemic has now laid bare in British schools.

how racism works

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