The past and the future of belongings - racially minoritized women's experiences of belonging in the Danish school

This article explores the racially minoritized girls’/women’s racialized and gendered experiences with belonging to the Danish public school (folkeskolen) from the 1970s up until today. Scholarly, the racially minoritized girls’/women’s school experiences have not been the subject of analysis to the same extent as those of the racially minoritized boys. In this article, we therefore examine how former and current racially minoritized students’ narratives about belonging are negotiated through gendered and racialized processes in a Danish school context. We are thus interested in investigating how experiences of being a racially minoritized girl/woman in a Danish school context take place over time and affect/have affected their experiences of belonging in school and in society. The article is based on different types of empirical data: Oral history interviews with former migrant students who attended Danish public school in the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, as well as focus group interviews with racially minoritized students who attended school in the 2010s. We are here inspired by Doreen Massey’s (2005) concept of multiple spatiality and time. By combining the two types of empirical material, we wish to investigate how time and space intertwine and inform experiences of belonging. Here we want to shed light on how past and present students look back and forward in time, respectively, when they describe and explain their experiences with racialization and belonging to the Danish school and society.