School of Social & Political Sciences

Before I ever taught in a university, I worked as a community interpreter with people in the asylum system. That experience changed how I listen, how I teach, and how I understand the ethics of education. Interpreting taught me that communication is never neutral. Every word, silence, and inflection, every space in which communication takes place, is shaped by power, by institutions of bordering, surveillance, and uneven access to rights. I carried those lessons into the classroom: deep listening, attentiveness to silence, holding space for discomfort, and mediating across difference.

Teaching, like interpreting, is never outside history or politics. The classroom is where knowledge is authorised, where some voices are amplified and others marginalised. This is where my commitment to developing a  critical pedagogy of migration studies begins: not with the pretence of neutrality, but with the conviction that every course design, reading list, and practice reflects values and histories. Our task is not to stand above these systems, but, like community interpreting, to work within them, critically, reflexively, and with care.

From “Safe” to Brave: Discomfort Done Ethically

I’m often asked what anti-oppressive or anti-racist teaching looks like in practice, especially when teaching migration and students have lived experience of asylum, displacement, or border violence. The honest answer is: it never looks the same twice. What it does require is acknowledging that safety is uneven. Not everyone arrives equally protected by citizenship, race, class, or institutional belonging. Rather than promising a “safe space,” I aim for brave spaces, where discomfort is not avoided, but structured ethically. Where we lean in to the discomfort to learn.

Here, I work with what I call good harm. The term is deliberately contradictory. Thinking sociologically is unsettling: it demands that we peel back layers, question familiar narratives, and notice how knowledge can reproduce harm. The goal is not to sanitise discomfort, nor to shock or shame, but to hold it carefully so it opens up reflection, accountability, and change.

I’d like to share one example of that that looks like in practice. When teaching about immigration detention, we engage with activist materials, testimonies, and counter-stories. The room often feels incredibly heavy; students name anger, sadness, and confusion, when learning about detention as a powerful, choking bordering technology, and the many insidious ways it spreads its tentacles into people’s lives and communities.  At first, many students are what Megan Boler describes as spectators, moved, yet distanced. The pedagogical challenge then is  to move from spectating to witnessing: to cultivate an active, ethical empathy that does not stop at feeling, but connects to responsibility and action. From that session came small but meaningful commitments: letter-writing, campaign support, and a readiness to question policies previously known only as abstractions. Critical pedagogy does not provide closure, but it does create movement, from knowing to acting, from empathy to accountability.

Teaching Migration as an Ethical Practice

Teaching about migration is never just academic work. It is emotional, political, and profoundly ethical. A central question in my practice is: How do we avoid extractive storytelling while still building shared understanding and solidarity? How do we teach about migration without turning people’s lives into data or case studies that circulate beyond their control?

One answer lies in co‑production, not only as a method, but as a refusal:

  • a refusal to work on communities rather than with them;
  • a refusal to treat lived experience as raw material serving only as illustration rather than knowledge;
  • and a willingness to listen when people say no, recognising refusal itself as a form of knowledge.

Projects like Asylum University, the RISE Manifesto, and Curating Discomfort have shaped my thinking. They challenge the assumption that knowledge must be pre‑validated through academic frameworks to be legitimate, and insist that lived experience is empirically rich and conceptually generative, capable of making theory, not simply illustrating it.

This requires an epistemic shift: rethinking who is authorised to know, and expanding the space where experience, emotion, and story are recognised as evidence and expert knowledge of how the world works. Teaching ethically means holding a tension: co‑producing knowledge while staying accountable for where that knowledge travels, who benefits, and what harm it might do.

Pedagogical moves that matter

For me, what works is less about tools than about a discursive space that is dialogic, participatory, and ethically grounded. A few practical moves:

  • Flipped, dialogic sessions: Students engage with materials in advance (texts, films, podcasts, poetry, data visualisations, community narratives). Class time becomes conversation, analysis, disagreement, and collective sense‑making over transmission.
  • Live materials and multiple voices: first-hand accounts, protests, artistic interventions, spoken word, counter-empirics connect theory to those most affected by migration regimes.
  • Structured listening: Rotation models where students interpret different media (a poem, campaign poster, audio clip, policy document), surfacing how language, image, and emotion mediate migration.
  • Space for silence and refusal: Sometimes the most ethical move is not to speak, for, or over, someone else. I invite students to consider refusing concepts or frameworks that sustain inequality, and to imagine alternatives.

Underlying this is a framework I call migration literacies: the intersection of critical literacy, media literacy, and racial literacy. These help students interrogate power, representation, and racialisation in migration discourse.

  • Critical literacy: questioning how knowledge is produced and authorised.
  • Media literacy: analysing representation and its effects.
  • Racial literacy: understanding how migration is racialised and governed, historically and in the present.

Applied together, these literacies expose the ideologies embedded in migration narratives and challenge the colonial and racialised frameworks that sustain them. We historicise the present, connecting contemporary debates to colonial pasts through examples like Windrush or violent racist protests at so called ’asylum hotels’. We examine how language doesn’t merely describe reality but produces it. Scholars such as Lenette, Zembylas, and Stierl remind us that educators can be structurally complicit, even unintentionally. In examining the dominant narratives around migration and questioning the assumptions that inform them. By fostering a deeper awareness of the ideologies embedded in migration discourse, we can begin to deconstruct the dominant narratives and challenge the racialized and colonial frameworks that sustain them. Migration literacies create space for good harm: sitting with discomfort in ways that challenge, rather than reproduce, racialised and colonial logics.

Refusal, Hope, Possibility

Teaching migration differently isn’t just about changing what we know; it’s about changing what we do with that knowledge. It involves refusal, refusing neutrality and extractive practices; refusing to teach as if power isn’t in the room. And it is about possibility: about care, collectivity, and imagining otherwise.

Here I hold onto what Henry Giroux calls educated hope,  not naïve optimism, but a disciplined belief that education can still be a site of resistance and transformation. Critical pedagogy does not promise comfort or closure. What it offers is more demanding and more meaningful: the chance to read the world differently, and, together, to begin to change it.

References:

Bhambra, G.K., Gebrial, D. and Nişancıoğlu, K. (eds) (2018) Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press.

Boler, M. (ed.) (1999) Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge.

Giroux, H.A. (2018) Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling: A Critical Reader. 1st edn. Routledge. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429498428.

Higgins, M. and Lenette, C. (eds) (2024) Disrupting the Academy with Lived Experience-Led Knowledge. 1st edn. Policy Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447366331.001.0001.

Hunterian Museum (2025) ‘Curating Discomfort’. Available at: https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/about/changing-museum/curating-discomfort/.

Piacentini, T. (2024) Developing a Critical Pedagogy of Migration Studies: Ethics, Politics, and Practice in the Classroom. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.56687/9781529227161.

Piacentini, T. and Teklehaimanot Yohannes, H. ‘Beyond the Border: Poetics of Refugee and Critical Classroom Praxis’ (2025). The Identities Podcast. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7xWsjyraRJmQakHPIDlSoa?si=745qSE6hSYmtT7jXfrdTaA&nd=1&dlsi=389bd5f17d0d4171.

RISE (2015) ‘RISE Statement on working with the refugee community’. RISE. Available at: https://aktiontanz.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/RISE-statement-on-working-with-the-refugee-community.pdf.

Stierl, M. (2022) ‘Do no harm? The impact of policy on migration scholarship’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 40(5), pp. 1083–1102. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420965567.

Zembylas, M. (2022) ‘The Affective Dimension Of Epistemic Injustice’, Educational Theory, 72(6), pp. 703–725. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12554.

 

Blog Page Image Credit: Theresa Berg. 

 

Get involved with local community organisations in Glasgow and Scotland: 

Suggested further reading:

 

 

 

First published: 1 February 2026

<< Blog