In this article, co-authored with Ben Johnson and Sarah Parkes, I use a New Materialist approach to explore how minoritised undergraduate students encounter and navigate the systems, spaces and relationships of university life.
In this article, published in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, we draw on a collaborative, student-led research project conducted at a UK university. Rather than treating the student experience as something shaped by individuals alone, the research considers how students become entangled with institutional processes, physical and digital spaces, relationships, objects and expectations.
Through artefact-making, spatial mapping and collective reflection, the research created opportunities for students to explore the university differently. These methods allowed experiences to emerge through conversation, movement, materials and shared acts of making, rather than relying only on conventional interviews or written responses.
Tracing Blockages, Flows and Belonging
Five key patterns shimmered through the research: feedback and assessment, data sharing, relationships, space and mentoring. These patterns revealed moments in which university systems enabled connection and movement, but also moments of blockage, uncertainty and disconnection.
A New Materialist perspective encourages us to look beyond the idea that students must simply learn how to navigate existing systems. Instead, it asks how those systems are produced through relationships between policies, technologies, spaces, staff, students and everyday practices. Student voice is therefore approached not simply as testimony about an experience, but as an active force capable of generating institutional insight and change.
The article argues that meaningful transformation does not always begin with large-scale institutional overhaul. It can begin through more attuned practices of listening, noticing and acting. By attending carefully to where blockages occur and where possibilities begin to flow, universities can work towards forms of belonging that are relational, embodied and continually being made.