Power and pedagogic failure: Seeking a politics of empathy towards an anti-racist academy

Abstract

This article reflects on the challenges of developing anti-racist commitments in a UK university during and ‘post’ pandemic and re-envisions pedagogic failure in this context. Tackling racism requires that our conversations start from a recognition that we are always situated in relationship not just to others but to the structures and cultures of our environments and communities. There are long histories of empathy and its role, risks and limits in intersectional understandings of the transformation of inequalities. We contend that empathy is integral to anti-racist pedagogies because it: centres relationality in critical and reflective learning; has the capacity to be subversive through its challenge to the ‘dominant transmission model of education prevalent in the neoliberal colonial university’; reveals how the university acts upon and works to erase consciousness of our emotional and embodied selves, and has the capacity to unsettle our epistemic horizons to reveal our complicity in colonial practices. Developing a dialogue between the co-authors who worked on a small, funded project on anti-racist learning within a UK Russell Group university in 2022–2023, the article explores the barriers experienced, along with the possibility of constituting ‘generative and fulfilling spaces’.