Bridges and Battlefields in Education: Reflections on embedding ‘diverse’, critical, and anti-racist approaches in schools

26 February 2026, 17:30-19:00

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Gatsby Room (Chancellor’s Centre), Wolfson College, Cambridge, and Zoom

This is the second event of this year’s annual ‘Hierarchies of Racism?’ series, focusing on race, racialisation, and racism within higher education institutions.

This session on race and education presents two practical case studies from our work embedding anti-racist approaches in schools. Drawing on data from an eight-year international development project (the ActionAid/SETA project) and a five-year professional development intervention in UK primary schools, the first examines how school leaders, educators and communities navigate the successes and struggles of anti-racist practice. It shows how engaging with histories of race and racism can address contemporary injustices, and how diverse national contexts galvanise a broader international effort toward racial justice in education.

The second case study reflects on a decade of work supporting the teaching of British histories of migration and empire in English secondary schools. Drawing on the Our Migration Story public history project, it situates recent curriculum reform initiatives within longstanding debates about the scope and content of British history teaching in schools, and the grassroots movements advocating for broader and more inclusive historical narratives.

Together, these case studies highlight the importance of historical engagement, collaborative practice, and sustained advocacy in creating critical, equitable, and anti-racist educational spaces.

Speakers

Dr Sharon Walker is a sociologist of race and education. Her research examines the material and discursive processes that reproduce the idea of racial difference, and racist practices and outcomes in education.  More broadly, she is interested in the cultural politics of race, and in race as a technology of state formation and practices of governance. Methodologically her research draws on critical discourse analysis, corpus approaches to discourse analysis and multi-sited ethnography. Theoretically, her work is influenced by perspectives from cultural studies, postcolonial sociology, and intellectual history. 

Dr Sundeep Lidher is Lecturer in Black and Asian British History (post-1800) at King’s College London. She has co-led various public history projects, including the multi-award-winning AHRC-funded ‘Our Migration Story’ website, a collaboration between the universities of Cambridge, Manchester, and The Runnymede Trust. Her work has been published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, and in various policy reports. Sundeep is working on her first monograph, which develops her PhD research on the imperial and global dimensions of British citizenship and immigration policy in the years between 1945 and 1962.