Exploring Challenges and Potentialities for Antiracist Education in the Nordic Countries: Cases from Finland and Denmark

With increasing forms of overt and covert racial discrimination in Nordic region, the role of education becomes ever more critical in identifying and responding to these processes. Educational institutions (such as schools and universities) are spaces through which societal relations of inclusion/exclusion are reproduced, but they can also potentially challenge various forms of inequalities. To discuss educational challenges for Nordic exceptionalism, we draw on two examples: how whiteness is infused in Finnish social work education curricula through color-blindness and mechanism of denial of racism as it evolves in a Danish secondary school classroom situation. Through these explorations, we draw parallels from different contexts about how Nordic exceptionalism is inculcated in educational settings and discuss how epistemic injustice unfolds in the absence of antiracist education.