Reclaiming black Irish school narratives: an autoethnographic counter-narrative of unequal schooling

This autoethnographic essay applies embodied, racialised, lived-experience knowledge to critical educational research, to demystify decolonial research practice by centring marginalised knowledge through non-oppressive research. 'Alternative' perspectives can be resituated to problematise the notion of a mainstream and confront processes of othering, offering a site of epistemic disruption. As a Black Irish researcher, previously a teacher, navigating a shifting positionality from teacher subject to researcher subject introduces theoretical and methodological challenges. The lack of research written from the perspective of the researched 'other' has limited our understanding of Ireland's increasingly racialised classrooms. Black children in Ireland are phenotypically hypervisible in schools yet this visibility is not reflected in the research, which often oversimplifies unequal power relations experienced by categorising Black students solely as 'newcomers' or 'migrants', collapsing complex migration histories into a single narrative. As storytelling is a critical methodological innovation and decolonising tool, this essay uses storytelling to make clear the complexities of being a Black researcher seeking to amplify Black voices and perspectives amidst a body of research centring whiteness.