This session will start with a welcome and introduction round (5 minutes): since participants have already prepared an analysis of the institutions in which they are working or studying in previous activity “Where do we think? A Critical Thinking World Map”, they will introduce themselves and their institutional background very briefly (2-3 sentences). This will prepare the critical collective and individual reflection and analysis of each participant’s relationship to structural racism in higher education in the following step.

In step two, the theory building practice (40 minutes), participants will combine personal accounts on their relationship to higher education (institutions) with critical reflections on their experiences in HEI as educators and/or students in their home institutions based on the readings. In this step, facilitators and participants meet online for the whole session. Participants will be assigned randomly to breakout rooms of a maximum of 5 people per group for the time of 25 minutes. Each group will assign a speaker and a writer. The writer collects notes, concepts, findings, ideas, and doubts on the shared digital platform Miro while discussing. After 25 minutes, the whole course will meet again and the speakers from each group will present their findings to the bigger group (2 minutes per group; 15 minutes in total). Based on the notes from the writers and the speakers, the facilitators will compose those findings in an online mind-map on Miro. Students can amend this mind-map afterwards to foster further discussion.

During these 40 minutes, participants are able to share their observations, reflections and critique, based on class readings and life experiences related to a) forms of exclusions in Higher Education, b) mechanisms of in- and exclusion in public policies regarding Higher Education, or c) in- and exclusion mechanisms and strategies in their educational everyday environment, in particular the university.

To inspire the discussion, we suggest the following guiding questions regarding the compulsory and additional readings:

• How do the texts analyse racism and eurocentrism in HEI? Do you see any differences between them?
• What statistics/numbers regarding inclusion/exclusion in HEI impressed you the most? Share with your group/the fish bowl!
• What forms of exclusion and inclusion are analysed in the readings? Did/do you make similar or different observations in your institution? What kind of different dynamics in your institutions can you observe? How do they differ?
• What forms of resistance towards racism and eurocentrism in HEI are detailed in the texts? Is there something similar going on at your institution?

In the third part, the facilitators will give a theoretical input (10 minutes), connecting the results from the theory building practice (step 2) with concepts from the BRIDGES toolkit, particularly “Neoliberal Compliance”, “Eurocentrism”, and “Migra*BPoC Resistance”. We will support this theoretical input with a follow-up discussion in a break-out room for each tool for 20 more minutes.

This session will close with an open discussion with a focus on possible strategies of resisting structural racism and eurocentrism in HEI (15 minutes).