Listening Differently: Granular Exclusions of Marginalised Early Career Teachers

Akhtar, Salya K. R. (2026) Listening Differently: Granular Exclusions of Marginalised Early Career Teachers. Doctoral thesis, Birmingham City University.

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Abstract

This research traces the affective encounters of marginalised Early Career Teachers (ECTeachers) teaching Subject English in Birmingham (UK) secondary schools. Within these spaces, teaching English and ideas about ‘becoming a teacher’ are entangled with Eurocentric, western, and normative logics that shape who belongs and how they belong. At its core, this research is about affect: the feelings, forces and relational movements that shape ECTeachers’ ‘becomings’, understood as ongoing rethinking of normative logics that unfold in complex, often invisible ways. For marginalised ECTeachers, the accumulation of subtle, affective material-discursive conditions, what I term ‘granular exclusions’, produce moments of tension, resistance, and difference, continually (re)shaping their becomings within educational assemblages.

Framed as post-qualitative inquiry (PQI), this research critiques the dominant epistemologies and exclusionary systems that structure Subject English and ECTeacher education in the UK. The research unfolds through confabulative conversations with eight ECTeachers, a research practice developed as an alternative to the linearity of conventional interviews (Johansson, 2016) and draws upon Haraway’s (2016) ‘speculative fabulation’ which invites us to think differently about knowledge and experiences. These open, informal and emergent conversations welcomed the complexity of teacher encounters as they moved in/through/out of dominant white and western spaces. ‘Sticky’ moments were revealed, which I read, using a process of agential cutting (Barad, 2007) and diffraction (Haraway, 1992, Barad, 2014). Experiences of being silenced, surviving and resisting cling and linger beyond these encounters and become part of marginalised ECTeachers’ becomings. I argue it is important to pay attention to these sticky affective encounters, if we (educators, educational policymakers and educational researchers) are to generatively improve experiences for marginalised ECTeachers.

Central to this research is Sara Ahmed’s (2021) work on complaint and the feminist ear; a mode of listening that attends to who is not heard and how they are not heard (Ahmed, 2021). I consider how a ‘feminist ear’ as a researcher position, made possible through representation, becomes an ethical and affective practice that blurs boundaries of participation, and this is a further contribution of this thesis. In respect of this researcher positionality, and research approach, this thesis is framed as killjoy work (Ahmed, 2023); the ongoing labour of refusing comfort, exposing injustice and sustaining critique and by plugging in #Killjoy Moments, my own voice and presence is made visible. Listening with a feminist ear reimagines educational spaces as sites of ethical relation, but also reveals how everyday acts of refusal, discomfort, and complaint can become productive sites of knowledge-making and becoming. This thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship in PQI; it challenges deficit-oriented ways of thinking in ECTeacher education and education broadly as well as methodological contributions through listening differently, creating a ‘much needed space’ that brings visibility to ECTeachers’ ‘granular exclusions’, which are routinely ignored or erased.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Dates:	Date Event 9 July 2026 Accepted
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Feminist Research; Post-Qualitative Research; Decoloniality; Education; Anti-Racism; Teacher Professionalism; Equality, Diversity
Subjects:	CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-01 - sociology, social policy and anthropology > CAH15-01-02 - sociology CAH22 - education and teaching > CAH22-01 - education and teaching > CAH22-01-01 - education CAH22 - education and teaching > CAH22-01 - education and teaching > CAH22-01-02 - teacher training
Divisions:	Doctoral Research College > Doctoral Theses Collection Law and Social Sciences > Education
Depositing User:	Louise Muldowney
Date Deposited:	14 Jul 2026 10:19
Last Modified:	14 Jul 2026 10:19
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/17115

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