Affective and agentic spaces in the postdigital university
"Being at" university has changed. How does that make us feel, and who does it allow us to be?
My nomadic professional patterns mean that I have semi-insider status at a range of universities in Melbourne. I have little markers of belonging — email addresses, staff cards, student cards, library logins — which make it possible for me to wander through physical and digital university spaces wearing various hats.
In the past few weeks I’ve begun to notice that “being at university” has become an entirely sterile experience for me. University buildings have been upgraded; lawns are tended; digital display boards are sparkling and invite students to engage in well-resourced opportunities to develop their graduate resumes. Things are… clean. I feel tremendously old when I write: it’s not like it used to be.
Being at university in 2006
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about my own undergraduate experience. It feels a sort of tatty, dingy thing. The student association was hosted in a sort of basement space under the uni pub, filled with various posters and pamphlets for student events and collectives. I spent a fair bit of time nestled nearby in the Queer Lounge, a rubbish little space shaped like a wedge of cheese crowded with zines, condoms and community art, and what I suspect was an ex-sharehouse couch. (Ever wondered what happens to a couch once it’s too shabby for a sharehouse??)
The Queer Lounge was crammed in beside an equally-miniscule Wom*n’s Room where you could find a bookshelf loaded with foxed old copies of Butler, Steinem and Greer. Both tiny rooms were treated simultaneously as hideaways and community spaces, where students experiencing marginalisation could go to feel safe and accepted.
They opened ominously out into the Christian Space, where Christian students gathered for various connection and worship opportunities. These proximities were sites of friction and challenge for us — in most ways an unhappy accident of space allocation, but at the same time a catalyst for reflection on how we shared, traversed and boundarised space in the university.
After signing up to as many clubs as I could in first year, I rallied a few friends around me to start a student club of my own. We played a little pantomime of electing a president (me!), vice president, secretary and treasurer, developing our own charter and recruiting students as excited as we were about film. (Ironically, those were the years in which film began to give way to high definition digital video.)
The spaces we created were scrappy and ephemeral. We used lecture theatres at night to hold screenings; pressed badges with classic screenplay lines on them; begged distribution companies for handouts to get free movie tickets for our members. Our website was a MySpace. It wasn’t slick; it couldn’t be. It wasn’t meant to be. It was exciting because it felt, for the first time in my sheltered life, like I was doing something in the real world that was being supported, but not evaluated, by anyone.
Being at university in 2024
Well, then I got a corporate job and I wasn’t surprised not to see any political posters up in the lunch room. Which, I suspect, is one reason why I didn’t really register the lack of them when I began working in universities. My work has always focused on online programs, so the physical campus was never a professional focus, but I’m still a little shocked that I’ve failed to notice for so long that student-facing university spaces have been all but stripped of agency.
Only a few weeks ago, a good friend of mine told me about a recent experience of being the subject of a complaint about activist messages they posted on a university campus. Specifically, they posted invitations for campus-dwellers to sign a petition to improve parking accessibility. The complaint didn’t relate to the political content, but purely to the fact of physically placing a message in a campus space where it would increase the campus cleaning costs.
And around the same time, I tried to organise a student discussion group. Shortly after polling interested students to find a good time, booking a meeting and receiving a slate of RSVPs, students began to pull out. I learned through friends that an academic in my faculty had responded poorly to hearing about the meeting. Their position was that such groups should only be organised through established hierarchies within the faculty (e.g., through that academic).
Ultimately I cancelled it. I didn’t feel safe. And I was, frankly, shocked that it could be harder to organise an unstructured discussion between doctoral candidates than it was to found and run a funded club as a 19-year-old.
Binary spaces and belonging
My experience is my own. There are plenty of undergrads who never hid in the Queer Lounge, and surely many graduate researchers who gather regularly without worrying what their supervisors will think.
I could suggest a research project into this, of course. Canvas the uni students of today and find out whether and how they feel gagged on campus. But something in me doesn’t like that. It could be done delicately, of course, but there’s something interventionalist about it, something impositional. Perhaps today’s students don’t expect to be able to put up posters. Perhaps that’s okay to them, right now. Perhaps by asking them, I’d be inserting the idea that it wasn’t okay.
But it’s definitely something worth thinking on. Academics across the world are struggling with their students’ unwillingness to return to on-campus classes now that COVID lockdowns are definitively over. It’s been almost three years and students are as transactional as ever about their university engagement.
There is some amazing work happening to understand sites of belonging in contemporary university spaces. I’d like to explore how feelings of belonging and unbelonging, acts of asserting and creating space, are connected to the value of the “university experience”.
Space becomes “place” when we imbue it with meaning — so what do university spaces mean, and are these meanings we want to preserve?