This paper is based on personal narratives of three transnational women academics of colour, within education faculties in Australian universities. As postcolonial subjects we focus, on providing spaces for future educators, to find multiple ways of knowing, being, and relating. Reflecting upon our pedagogic practices, we analyse the empowerment afforded by our individual positionings in facilitating a deeper understanding of social justice and inclusion in our classrooms. Using collaborative autoethnography, we outline our endeavours to raise critical queries through Freire’s notion ofconscientizacao. We unpack our own pedagogic frailties while enacting ‘pedagogy of discomfort’, as we subvert the proliferation of educational hegemonies considering it may lead to erasures of certain epistemologies. This paper conclusively highlights our efforts to ensure the creation of conscientizacao, in ourselves and our students, while concomitantly abnegating ‘pedagogy of rupture’ and being mindful of our individual positionings and our students’ varied contexts.

This article problematises the neo-colonial legacies of Westernised education in the experiences of empowerment, disempowerment and identity negotiations of two immigrant academic women often positioned as ‘elite’ transnationals in Australia. Through positioning theory and postcolonial theory as frameworks, critical autoethnography as a research method shapes our personal accounts within two postcolonial contexts (India and Mauritius). We explore the tensions and dualities of race, class, ethnicity and gender engendered through an anglicised education. Our empowerment manifests as privilege and access to knowledge and opportunities for transnational mobility. We unpack the gradual erosion of our cultural rootedness and a renegotiation of our migrant identities entailing both submissiveness and resistance. Situating education as a force in our lives, we query whether it is an ‘empowerment tool’ concomitantly creating and deleting elements of our cultural history OR reclaiming the paradoxes of privilege and ‘disempowerment’ shaped by a neo-colonial education?

Research-informed immersive professional learning in schools is another avenue for pre-service teachers (PSTs) to develop their understanding and reflection about theories, methods, and practices of teaching and learning. From a collaborative research project that aimed at developing the intercultural capabilities of Prep level students in a primary school, in this paper, as teacher educators, we examine the views of four PSTs involved in this project. The findings draw upon the opportunities and affordances PSTs identified from this in-school “immersive” and situated teaching experience in; bridging the incongruences of the theory/practice divide; reflecting on their teaching practices; and in improving their teacher efficacy, agency, and relational agency. From a reflexive stance, as teacher educators, we further discuss the implications of this collaborative research with PSTs in closing the gap of the theory/practice divide between university-based learning and teaching practices in schools. We also discuss the mentioned affordances as emphasised by the PSTs towards the improvement of their teacher efficacy, agency, and relational agency. The paper concludes on further strengthening of university-school collaborative research partnerships. It highlights research-informed projects to offer PSTs opportunities for situated teaching experiences from guided mentorship as another avenue for “immersive” professional learning in schools.

Purpose: Identity, positioning and possibilities intersect differently for South Asian women in white academia. Within a broader migrant community that defines Australian life, these identities and positioning imply great possibility, but pursuing such pathways within academia is a walk on the last strand of resilience. This paper explores this tension of possibilities and constraints, using hope theory to highlight the cognitive resistance evident in the narratives of three South Asian women in Australian academia.Design/methodology/approach: The authors use collaborative autoethnography to share their narratives of working in Australian universities at three different stages of careers, utilising Snyder's model of hope theory to interrogate their own goal-setting behaviours, pathways and agentic thinking.Findings: The authors propose that hope as a cognitive state informs resistance and enables aspirations to contribute within academia in meaningful ways whilst navigating the terrain of inequitable structures.Originality/value: The authors' use of hope theory as a lens on the intersectional experiences of career making, building and progression is a new contribution to scholarship on marginalised women in white academe and the ways in which the pathways of resistance are identified.

Identity in relation to ‘settlement’ as a migrant generates challenges in redefining the old self into what one is and/or ought to become. The process of ‘becoming’ and redefinition of the ‘self’ leads to an ongoing struggle alongside the context, practices and culture of the host country thus creating multiple challenges while discarding or modifying popular notions of self and culture. Identities are fluid and subject to varying degrees of change brought about by one’s experiences and culture. As two ethnic migrant women in Australia, living in the context of social cleavages encompassing race, gender, culture, class, education and memories, we acknowledge our hybrid identities based on our past selves and the borrowed/adapted ways of doing and being in Australia. Tied in with these issues of identity is the concept of ‘settlement’ in Australia. While remaining mindful that dislocation of nation is not always dislocation of gender and social class, our autoethnographic accounts reveal our negotiations of ‘settlement’ within this alien yet now familiar space. In the process, this paper highlights the need for a niche discussion space for unpacking the experiences of transnational women of colour such as us who occupy a zone of what we term as ‘privileged marginalisation’.

Reconciliation is a contested term often associated with postcolonial discourses, contending with global histories of injustice, racial discrimination and dispossession that affect diverse groups (slaves, indentures or Indigenous people). Reconciliation stories mainly encounter resistance when problematized by individual experiences. As a woman of Indo-Mauritian indenture descent, I explore my ancestral stories from gendered dimensions: hailed by hardships, discrimination and patriarchal norms from colonialization and its legacies. I discuss my perceived subalternity and disempowerment in defining my positioning and identity. From an arts-based inquiry, I use bricolage to combine art·I/f/act·ology, evocative auto-ethnography and emotional reflexivity in framing emotion-based writing. Intersectionality as a theoretical lens situates the influences of race, culture, ethnicity, caste, gender and identity processes within my narratives. The discussion emphasizes a voiced resistance and conflict with reconciliation. My visual narratives display and are rooted in the listening and co-ownership of ancestral stories as mine, wherein I find voice and agency.