About the project
The project runs from September 2025 to July 2026 and is funded by the UCL Global Engagement Funds 25/26.
Background
This project aims to retheorize futurity and space-making in higher education (HE). We will do this through understanding the emergence of:
- social identities
- individual trajectories, and
- infrastructures.
We explore how these are reshaped as social actors engage with meanings, practices and disciplinary forms of knowledge in the daily life of universities. This is crucial at a time when higher education is at a crossroads, caught in between socioeconomic and political transformations that call its societal function into question.
Universities are becoming a key social terrain for the experimentation of new modes of:
- knowledge production, and
- social organisation.
The project draws attention to the emerging meanings, practices and (un)desired subjectivities that are enmeshed and embodied in higher education. It looks at how they expand beyond the traditional focus on curriculum and the promise of employability. They explore more complex materialised entanglements of space and personhood. These approaches aim to fuel radical (re)imaginings of the future of work and community engagement.
Methodology
Through ethnographic approaches, we pay attention to the specific role(s) of language and communication. Drawing on these, the project generates a rich corpus of data. This will generate a better understanding of the processes involved in university projects of transformation, such as:
- social processes
- communicative practices
- material infrastructures, and
- lived experiences.
We use a variety of methods, including:
- interviews and focus groups with relevant stakeholders
- participant observations in activities and exhibitions associated with the material transformation of the focal universities
- document analysis of relevant policies and digital artefacts created by these universities, and
- linguistic landscapes of university campuses.
Team
London team members
International team members
Contact us
Centre for Applied Linguistics
Department of Culture, Communication and Media
UCL Institute of Education
University College London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Image
Sam Robinson for UCL.