Education as a liberatory practice in the sociology classroom: integrating autoethnographic storytelling approaches to challenge epistemic injustice

This article offers a theoretically informed account of autoethnographic approaches to teaching and assessment in multidisciplinary and culturally-diverse classrooms. Drawing on our pedagogical practice within a post-92, majority-minority institution in the UK, we argue that incorporating students’ narratives and lived experiences into how we teach sociology can challenge traditional academic hierarchies and redress epistemic injustice in the university. We contend that working towards epistemic justice in higher education cannot be confined to pedagogy or the conditions of the classroom alone and must equally concern the design of assessment itself. When auto-methods are embedded in pedagogy and assessment, students can be positioned as knowledge producers and develop the language, critical thinking, and analytical skills needed to connect their lived realities with broader social and cultural contexts, dynamics, and issues. Grounded in an intersectional feminist and decolonial ethos, we explore teaching as a liberatory practice, reimagining classrooms not merely as sites of academic inquiry but as spaces of possibility, praxis, and transformation. Considering the risks and tensions that emerge with this work, we reflect on questions of power dynamics, vulnerability, re-traumatisation, and institutional constraints. Overall, this article contributes to ongoing conversations on autoethnographic pedagogies, epistemic justice, and social justice education through a decolonial-intersectional lens.