Teaching contentious material: Challenges, opportunities, solutions Radical Empathy as Pedagogical Praxis: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Building Inclusive Curriculums and Societies

SunHa Ahn^*

• School of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Glasgow, Dumfries, United Kingdom

From the outset of my doctoral inquiry, a persistent reflexive question has guided my scholarly trajectory: how might educators authentically engage with contexts shaped by intersectional marginalisations—the overlapping and compounding forms of exclusion structured across race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and health status? This inquiry unfolds through two interrelated domains. Firstly, in my role facilitating qualitative methodology workshops within UK higher education (HE), I have observed student discomfort when introduced to decolonial perspectives. This resistance often arises not merely from individual reluctance but from deeply entrenched epistemic hierarchies rooted in neoliberal, individualistic, and rationalist ideologies. Secondly, as a critical feminist researcher, I have engaged with the reflexivity of working with marginalised participants—female Black South African women confronting gendered health inequities. These experiences underscore the necessity of bridging epistemic and affective divides between privileged and marginalised groups in HE. This paper argues that embedding radical empathy within pedagogical praxis and deliberately integrating intersectional positionalities into curriculum design are vital for cultivating transformative, justice-oriented educational environments. Radical empathy, understood as a sustained ethical–political engagement rather than sentimentality, enables classrooms to function as dialogic and emancipatory spaces where silenced voices are recognised and epistemic comfort is unsettled. By reconceptualising classrooms as laboratories of empathy, equity, and democratic renewal, educators can resist market-driven and positivist imperatives, promote critical reflexivity, and cultivate the relational capacities necessary for inclusive, plural, and socially just societies. Although grounded in the UK HE context, the proposed model of pedagogy embedded in radical empathy holds global applicability.