“I adapt to wherever I am”.: Religious minority students’ orientations across Danish vocational and higher education

In Denmark, growing numbers of students from religious and ethnic minority backgrounds are entering higher education. Despite this success, these students often experience persistent non-belonging in educational settings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and narrative interviews across three study programmes in vocational and higher education, this article examines how religiously minoritised students navigate educational spaces shaped by white normativity and secular ideals. Focusing on long-term experiences of othering, the analysis shows how students’ orientations towards education are informed by earlier encounters with stigmatization and racialisation. Withdrawal and code-switching emerge as key strategies through which students seek recognition and manage negative stereotyping. While these strategies may support educational persistence, they also involve significant affective labour put on those already marginalised, and thus reinforce conditional forms of inclusion. The article concludes by discussing the need for further and higher educational institutions to address present affective imaginaries and conditions for recognition and belonging.