‘It’s a little complicated for me’: faculty social location and experiences of pedagogical partnership

Pedagogical partnership is increasingly recognized as a practice with the potential to contribute to more just and equitable post-secondary education institutions. Previous studies have reported on the ways specific institutional programs attend to issues of equity, particularly considering if and how they involve students from marginalized groups. Similarly, others have argued for the scaling-up of partnership initiatives as a way to ensure greater inclusion and diversity amongst the staff and students who participate. Whilst the literature on this dimension of pedagogical partnerships grows, further attention to the ways in which faculty social locations influence and intersect with perceptions and experiences of partnerships is merited. Our study contributes to the literature exploring this issue. Our findings show a complex range of ways in which participants understand their social locations and the ways these influence their experiences of partnership, demonstrating the need for sophisticated conceptualizations of power and risk that attend to individuals’ positions within and outside of partnership spaces.