Friendship pedagogies as technologies of power: deploying friendship to foster participation of racially minoritized students in Danish education

This article explores how friendship relations have been understood and used in approaches to the participation of racially minoritized students in Danish schools from the 1970s until the present day. Using Foucault’s concepts of technologies of power and problematization we approach friendship as a pedagogical technology. This allows us to examine how friendship is implied in school pedagogies and to identify the problems such pedagogies of friendship claim to address. Based on an analysis of literature targeting education professionals we examine the rationales behind education professionals’ use of friendship as a pedagogy and how these rationales have changed over time. We identify three distinct pedagogical problematizations: friendship as a tool for Danish language skills, friendship for intercultural understanding and antiracism, and friendship for integration and social mixing. Our analysis shows that friendship has increasingly been problematized in terms of the Danish welfare state’s migrant integration project.