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Paper short abstract

This article explores Roma children’s experiences of segregated schooling in Hungary, analysing how decolonising the curriculum through drama and theatre-in-education fosters critical cultural literacy and moments of micro-decolonial agency amid enduring educational inequality.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines education as a lived site of aspiration and constraint through an ethnographic study of Roma children attending a segregated primary school in Hungary. Drawing on the concept of stuckedness (Hage 2009), it explores how students and teachers experience restricted social mobility as an everyday condition shaped by long-standing patterns of educational segregation, racialisation, and socio-economic marginalisation. Inequality is approached not as a static condition but as a process continually reproduced through institutional arrangements, curricular hierarchies, and future-oriented educational expectations. The analysis is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, including sustained presence in the school.

Focusing on efforts to decolonize the curriculum, the article analyses two forms of artistic and critical pedagogy that foster critical cultural literacy within the constraints of segregated schooling. The first is a drama project led by a local Roma teacher that draws on students’ personal experiences and Roma cultural heritage. Informed by Freirean critical pedagogy (Freire 1970), this practice emphasizes dialogue, reflexivity, and embodied storytelling to affirm Roma identities and challenge deficit-based representations embedded in mainstream education. The second intervention is led by an external artistic partner applying theatre-in-education methods inspired by Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal 1979). Through participatory reworkings of canonised literary texts, this approach unsettles cultural hierarchies and enables students to critically engage with the literary canon.

While these initiatives do not dismantle structural segregation, the article argues that they generate forms of micro-decolonial agency, creating temporary yet meaningful spaces of creativity, recognition, and imagined alternative futures.