Conference Program

The sociology of education today tends to offer a fragmented representation of the university experience, fragmented between performance indicators, services, careers and student living conditions. Even institutional surveys, although useful on a quantitative level, return a multidimensional but disjointed image of experience, helping to proceduralize it and reduce it to the sum of measurable variables. This contribution starts from a critique of this fragmentation and proposes to return an integrated vision of the university experience, assuming the concept of experience as a central theoretical category. The objective is twofold. Firstly, the work establishes a theoretical dialogue between Paolo Jedlowski and François Dubet, taking experience as an analytical key to understanding the transformations of contemporaneity. In Jedlowski, experience is embodied and socially situated knowledge, inscribed in a "world taken for granted", but exposed to fractures, crises and historical transformations. The experience changes with the processes of advanced modernity – functional differentiation, acceleration, mediatization – until it is configured as fragmented and devoid of narrative continuity. In Dubet, the sociology of experience focuses instead on the work of the actor who composes different logics of action – integration, strategy, subjectivation – in the absence of a unitary principle.Experience thus becomes the place where the subject produces coherence in the plurality of social rationalities. The comparison between the two authors allows us to articulate two complementary levels: on the one hand, the historical transformation of the conditions of possibility of experience; on the other, the reflective work through which individuals build meaning in fragmentation. Experience is neither an immediate given nor pure interiority, but a relational and historically situated process. The second objective consists in applying this theoretical framework to the specificity of the university institution, proposing an integration between the temporal and spatial dimensions of experience. If Jedlowski's reflection highlights the centrality of temporality – sedimentation, duration, fracture, discontinuity – our contribution introduces an explicit thematization of spatiality, conceived not as a simple container but as a relational configuration produced by the interweaving of practices, material devices and attributions of meaning. The university experience thus emerges as an interweaving of rhythms and thresholds, accumulations and ruptures, but also as a concrete configuration made up of classrooms, corridors, campuses, digital platforms and hybrid environments. Time and space co-produce each other in a specific ecology of learning and subjectivity. The university is assumed as a place to "experience" in a double sense: a space for the transmission of formalized knowledge and a context for the elaboration of a situated knowledge that goes beyond the official curricula. In this perspective, the university experience appears as a combination of institutional socialization, individual strategies and processes of subjectivation. Methodologically, this implies reconstructing it through biographical accounts, daily practices and analysis of organizational devices, taking the university as a privileged laboratory to observe the contemporary transformation of the relationship between institutional knowledge and knowledge of experience.