IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A
Abstract
This paper explores related aspects of negotiating challenging and often emotionally-charged situations within the higher education classroom. These distinct but practically interconnected areas include teaching sensitive content with the potential to evoke uncomfortable responses; negotiating tensions in intersections of imperatives of freedom of speech and EDI in teaching spaces; and managing challenging behaviours and interactions in the classroom. We draw on our pedagogic experiences as academics from across social science disciplines, and our reflections on these from commitments to critical, feminist and anti-racist pedagogies and praxis. Our involvement in different aspects of institutional Equality, Diversity and Inclusion work, further informs our perspective, acknowledging the complex junctures between policies and the everyday micro-interactions in academic life (Guillemin and Gillam 2004). Through autoethnographic reflections from teaching through these tensions and on work with colleagues more widely to support this, we explore how such ruptures invite us to embrace challenge as core to the HE classroom, engaging with such central questions as what is education for? We are at a critical point in terms of competing imperatives around academic excellence, freedom and EDI impacting all HEIs and disciplines. While we focus here on the UK context, these tensions have wider international relevance. While precarious and often uncomfortable, such sites of instability offer rich opportunity for interrogating power dynamics (St. Pierre and Pillow 2000). Rather than being a problem to overcome, the ‘messiness’ (Bartels & Wagenaar 2018) of such learning encounters can be a pedagogic opportunity to embrace deep learning and connection for students and staff, modelling critical reflexivity and pedagogical good practices, skilling students and colleagues to negotiate such challenging spaces from a place of both curiosity and responsibility.
Tamsin Hinton-Smith is a Professor of the Sociology of Gender and Education and Associate dean for Culture, Equality and Inclusion. Her longstanding research interests are around broad experiences of inclusions and exclusions in higher education in international contexts, including as relate to students and staff; curriculum, pedagogies and leadership; and dimensions of lived experiences including First generation participants, care responsibilities, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) and careleavers.
Hadir Elshafay is an Assistant Professor at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology. With and education and scholarship focus, Hadi’s teaching and research activities are embedded in participatory approaches to education for social justice in the urban context. Hadi holds a PhD in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She is passionate about how justice is experienced in everyday interactions and how they formulate micro-dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in our cities. Hadi’s work is anchored in cosmopolitan citizenship and constructivism with a focus on citizen-led actions, narratives and practices of justice discourses in the urban context, including disability justice, food justice and contested sustainability.
Fezile Sibanda is a PGR and Tutor in Education at the University of Sussex. She has previously worked as a research assistant at the University of Brighton. Through these roles she is experienced in contributing to research design, data collection, analysis, and dissemination. Fezile is also a Doctoral Tutor teaching on the Developing Role Models module. In this role she has designed and led workshops training University of Sussex students as peer mentors for secondary school pupils, and has facilitated peer-mentoring sessions for pupils led by these Sussex students. Fezile’s broad interests are in race inequalities in education.
Lizzy McKinney: I am a Lecturer within the Sociology department, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). My background is practice based, working within youth services and community arts, as well as higher education. I previously taught in pupil referral units (PRUs) and FE programmes before joining University of Sussex Business School and then Sussex Law School running academic and research skills workshops. I have also had some experience leading departmental and employability related programmes at University of Sussex, University College
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Friday 26th June, 2026