This article builds on a classroom study and interviews with facilitators and students on a travelling Folk High School course on global justice and development, an education that raises awareness about colonial history and contemporality. The study explores how the concept of being 'in and against' presents itself in the narratives of the research participants, and what those narratives can say about institutional and global conditions for transnational popular educational engagement. The results mirror the ambiguities of criticising the global, structural, and institutional conditions, while also relying on the same prerequisites, to conduct the course. It shows how working in and against the classroom, as expressed from the different perspectives of the students and the facilitators, entails countering both global and institutional material orders as well as prevailing hegemonic knowledge, and working in and against a gendered, classed, and racialized classroom.