School leaders negotiating black students’ racist encounters: how the curation of educational experiences enculturate subjectivities.

Schools function as contradictory sites, presented simultaneously as safe spaces for students yet also as environments that reflect and reinforce broader societal values. While school leadership is often positioned as a solution to public concerns, the Republic of Ireland has witnessed an increase in public incidents explicitly targeting the lives and safety of Black individuals. Drawing on Sharon Todd’s work on educational encounters, this study explores how school leaders in Ireland negotiate educational encounters of racism involving Black students through vignette-framed interviews with eight post-primary school leaders. The findings are organised around two interrelated analytical themes: first, the tendency to suspend or defer engagement with race through investigative pauses and appeals to institutional neutrality. Secondly, the recognition of a need for system-wide education but the reliance on technical or procedural solutions around professional development. Together, the themes indicate that the school leaders often struggled to come into relation with the embodied experiences of racialisation represented in the vignettes. The study concludes that such practices operate as enculturating processes, curating educational encounters in ways that privilege dominant racial normativity while limiting recognition of how racialised encounters may orient Black students’ sense of safety and self.