Conference Agenda

Literature

International scholarly conversations about the university precinct can be broadly divided into two largely distinct and multidisciplinary areas. One focuses on estates managers’ concerns with costs, planning, and efficiency, and keeping pace with universities’ ever-evolving provision (Coulson et al. 2015) alongside architects’ interests in aesthetics, design, and functional and symbolic value (Boys 2014). This work is fascinating and insightful in knowing how the construction and maintenance operate, but it largely neglects the lived experience. This means that assertions about how those higher education spaces actually work remain largely speculative. The other literature incorporates more practice-oriented, evidence-based debates on whether universities are fit for fulfilling their multiple and expanding range of purposes (Harris-Huemmert 2019). This extends into the established recognition of how campuses can be in-/exclusionary for different groups (Solorzano et al. 2000) and how technology – and more recently the pandemic – have raised questions about the nature of higher education’s physical assets and even whether we need them at all (Spire 2023).

What is missing, and this is gap has been noted for some time, is research which connects the two discussions (Temple 2023). That which has been published – in English at least - is both disciplinarily as well as geographically dispersed, and as such this remains an underexplored and somewhat nascent topic. We do know, though, that campuses are not simply neutral canvasses on which activity happens, but that the physical and social aspects relate. This includes, for example, how campus buildings can both inspire or intimidate (Thompson et al. 2025). There is also some work which considers how students move around campuses, but this rarely extends beyond quantitative tracking (see Greene and Penn 1997) other than to consider where traditionally marginalised groups feel un-/safe (Flint 2021). This paper positions itself in relation to this work by exploring how a diverse group of students describes both their campus and how they feel about it, as well as well as what influences their movements around the university precinct.

On Space

Given the ostensibly interdisciplinary nature of how campuses can be conceptualised, a range of theorisations have been invoked, from Lacanian subjectivity to Bronfenbrenner’s ecology. The most commonly applied concept, though, is that of space, albeit in different ways and at different scales. This paper draws on the work of Doreen Massey (2008) in particular, who formulates spaces as interrelational areas where people and artefacts come together and are transformed in the process. In other words, rather than a place as simply a designated, somewhat static location that can be topographically described, spaces are continually in flux due to the ongoing processes of those repeated comings together. Massey is also at pains to point out that the relations within a space are often hierarchical and therefore understanding them requires capturing a diversity of perspectives. Thinking about universities in this way is helpful because it allows us to imagine and then investigate the rich and ever-changing panoply of people, ideas, and physical items that they consist of and the interactions and dynamics that this engenders. While being widely used in geography, Massey’s work has thus far only sparingly been applied in research on higher education (Samura 2018).

With this in mind, this paper seeks to address the following question:

How do students describe their campus socio-materially, and what mediates their movements around it?

Literature

International literature on university populations has long recorded marked growth in both the volume and variety of students (Fitzgerald et al. 2012; Purcell et al. 2016). While this was primarily driven by neoliberal adherence to supply-side human capital theory (Brown et al. 2011) this was also infused with social justice rationales in terms of widening access to ‘non-traditional’ (aka first generation) learners, including those from wider racial and ethnic groups. It has been supplemented, too, with greater numbers of international students in an attempt to maintain host countries’ soft power and – through higher international student fees – offset the costs of increased domestic enrolments (Buckner and Zapp 2021).

A more heterogeneous student population presents challenges in terms of support and augmented pedagogy (Lomer and Mittelmeier 2021), but is seen to additionally convey both personal as well as social benefits. In the first instance, research shows that meaningful interactions outside students’ sometimes narrow pre-university social groups can engender more inclusive attitudes and improved critical thinking and employability skills (Dunne 2017). Secondly, it is asserted that that intergroup contact can cumulatively lead to more prevalent understanding of, and respect for, cultural differences more broadly (Hudson and Rockenbach 2025a). This, many have argued, is one of higher education’s core purposes and as such should be actively fostered (Hurtado 2007). However, it is clear is that simply diversifying the student body is not enough since many higher education institutions remain hostile to those not drawn from its nationally dominant groups. Extensive scholarship highlights the wide-ranging difficulties faced by – among others – female, working class, ethnic minority, international, disabled, mature, and LGBTQI+ students (Deem et al. 2022).

The majority of work around students’ experiences to date focuses on marginalised rather than dominant groups but there is relatively little work that considers multiple perspectives simultaneously (although see Dunne 2009; Keane 2011). Also, while what some call ‘boundary crossing’ (Hudson and Rockenbach 2025b) between social groups is known to have positive outcomes, this remains a somewhat neglected area, particularly as far as the lived experience of these interpersonal dynamics are concerned. This paper therefore examines how a diverse group of students at a large, high status university in England describes and understands their positions and experiences relative to the wider student population.

Theoretical Framing

This paper applies Doreen Massey’s (2008; 2018) conceptualisation of space. In Massey’s work, spaces are interrelational areas where people and artefacts coalesce and interact. This allows us to see education institutions more richly by examining how their constantly changing cast of staff and learners – as well as ideas, texts, buildings, and so on – come into contact with one another and in the process be changed in some way (Brown and Schweisfurth 2024). In other words, rather than a place such as a campus being simply a neutral physical landscape, universities as spaces represent a transformational zone that is constantly in flux due to the interactions between whatever and whoever comes into contact. Massey also highlights how these interrelations can be – in fact almost invariably are – hierarchical, and any investigation of a space therefore requires the inclusion of a multiplicity of perspectives. Massey’s work, while widely used in geography, has only been sparingly applied in higher education to date, largely around exploring the experiences of marginalised students (Samura 2018; Flint 2021). However, it appears to have considerable value and as such is the theoretical lens adopted here in addressing the following research question:

How do students describe the student population of their university and the relations that mediate their experiences within it?

Across European higher education, diversity and inclusion have become central policy concerns, yet institutional approaches often translate these commitments into managerial categories that depoliticise inequality and marginalise lived experience. In the context of multiple intersecting crises (social, political, ecological, and epistemic) questions arise about how knowledge is produced, whose knowledge counts, and how universities might act responsibly while remaining spaces of critique and care. This paper addresses these questions by exploring how community is enacted as a relational and epistemic practice within higher education.

The paper presents findings from an engaged ethnographic study of Durf Divers Denken (DDD), a grassroots platform at Ghent University that brings students and staff together to collectively reflect on structural exclusion, belonging, and diversity within the university. Rather than approaching community as a stable or harmonious entity, the study conceptualises community as an ongoing, contested process that emerges through encounters, dialogue, affective labour, and shared responsibility.

Drawing on bell hooks’s Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope as a theoretical lens, and informed by feminist, decolonial, and affect theory, the analysis examines how community functions not only as a social form but also as a mode of knowing and acting. The paper asks: How is community enacted within higher education through a grassroots initiative, and what conditions make such community possible in a context shaped by institutional logics of efficiency and performativity?

Empirically, the paper centres on two ethnographic scenes: an iftar gathering organised within a university department, and a participatory G-100 dialogue event on diversity and inclusive teaching. These scenes are analysed through close reading and collaborative interpretation, foregrounding how space, material arrangements, affect, and narrative shape collective engagement. Rather than seeking generalisation, the paper offers situated insight into how alternative forms of knowledge emerge through embodied and relational practices.

The analysis identifies three interconnected movements through which community is enacted:
(1) relational coming together, where gathering itself becomes a political and epistemic act;
(2) collective reflection and shared commitment, where lived experiences are articulated as meaningful knowledge that speaks back to institutional discourse; and
(3) moving in and with, capturing the slow, non-linear work of sustaining community and translating reflection into relational responsibility.

These movements illuminate tensions between institutional demands for measurable outcomes and the slow, affective labour required to build trust, recognition, and shared meaning. The paper argues that such grassroots spaces reveal the limits of dominant epistemologies within higher education, while simultaneously offering alternative ways of knowing that are relational.

By positioning community as a form of knowledge practice, this paper contributes to debates on the changing conditions and potentials of education research. It invites reconsideration of how universities might engage diversity not as policy rhetoric, but as a lived, collective, and transformative process that reconfigures what counts as knowledge, action, and responsibility in higher education.

This work‑in‑progress paper presents preliminary results from a qualitative research project that investigates how rural municipalities incorporate the potentials, resources, and needs of the local area when using higher education as a tool in rural and local development in Denmark. The difficulties of creating well-functioning rural higher education are not unique to Denmark but seen across countries in the Global North. We see increasing political focus on higher education as a tool for rural and regional development, while students predominantly seek out the large educational cities when choosing higher education. This means that educational institutions outside the large cities have difficulty attracting students, as there are many vacant study places, resulting in poor education economics. It is therefore not enough to relocate higher education institutions, if young people are not following suit.

The project consists of two parts: the institutional level and the student level. This paper focuses on the latter, examining why students have chosen a particular decentralised higher education programme, and how both place and educational institution shape their local identity, everyday practices, and sense of belonging. The study is guided by these research questions:

1. What motivates students to choose the education in question?
2. What is their relationship to the educational institution and the local area?
3. How are education and mobility included in their ideas about the good life?

Spatial and mobility theories inspire the theoretical framework. Spatial theories (Tuan, 2001; Warf & Arias, 2009) provide insight into the importance of places and the diversity of places. This is important in relation to rural research, because these areas are distinguished by their diversity (Høst & Larsen, 2016). Spatial theories can also help to identify place-specific resources and qualities, as well as the importance these have for people who have grown up in a place – the so-called “location-specific insider-advantages” (Mærsk et al., 2021b).

With the concept of relational space, Massey (1994; 2005) explains that places are not static and not just one thing for all people, but places are a dynamic phenomenon created through social relations and interactions. This is a useful approach to understanding higher education institutions’ significance for a locality and student’s consideration for (not) choosing to study somewhere.

“Geographical imaginaries” refer to the mental images and perceptions that individuals have of different places, which shape their understanding and choice of higher education institutions (Beech, 2014). These imaginaries influence young people’s decision-making by creating certain perceptions of places that either attract or repel them in terms of educational choices (Holdsworth, 2009). For example, geographical imaginaries of rural areas can often be associated with lower prestige or less exciting opportunities (Gilmartin & Berg, 2007).

The starting point for mobility theories (Salazar, 2010; Sheller & Urry, 2006) is to understand humans as fundamentally mobile, but in different ways and especially on different scales throughout life, from micromobility in everyday life to the large-scale relocations associated with life transformations (Cresswell, 2011). Mobility theories also challenge what it means to be (im)mobile and give us a perspective on what can be understood as (im)mobility (Mærsk et al., 2021). For example, it is often seen as an expression of lack of mobility if young people in rural areas only move 20-30 km when they move from home, while young people in large cities are not seen as immobile by moving the same distance. Mobility theories not only examine physical/geographical mobility, but also social mobility and the connection between these. This is particularly important in the context of education, because physical mobility (to the big cities) is often associated with social mobility (through the education system) (Holloway & Jöns, 2012).