Abstract This study examines the integration of activist pedagogy in politically constrained environments, focusing on the ethical and practical challenges faced by scholar-activists who teach justice-centred curricula. Centring on Malaysia’s restrictive political landscape, which remains fraught with limitations despite the democratic shifts of 2018, the study investigates the dual role of educators as teachers and strategic human rights actors. It analyses the tensions between institutional expectations of neutrality and the imperative to advance human rights in contexts where advocacy carries political risks. Anchored in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Boler’s Pedagogy of Discomfort, this article explores how these frameworks can be adapted to classroom practice. Using autoethnographic reflection on a decade (2015–25) of teaching undergraduate human rights courses, the analysis highlights strategies of curricular design, classroom dialogue, and active learning that balance the fostering of critical inquiry with the avoidance of ideological imposition. The findings show how activist pedagogy can be operationalized through reflexivity and context-specific strategies across three domains: politically contentious issues, social and cultural sensitivities, and institutional constraints. The study concludes that activist pedagogy, when applied reflexively and strategically, holds transformative potential to empower learners and sustain critical engagement, even in environments where academic freedom and open dialogue remain tightly circumscribed.
Ying Hooi Khoo (Wed,) studied this question.