Conference Program

Contemporary higher education is increasingly structured by neoliberal regimes of competition, audit, and individual performance. These dynamics disproportionately affect early-career researchers and exacerbate inequalities linked to gender, race, class, geographical origin, and sexuality, contributing to both material precarity and epistemic marginalization (Boynton, 2021; Conelli, 2022). Within this context, democratizing academia increasingly involves alternative social relations and knowledge practices capable of transforming everyday academic life.

This paper draws on a collaborative reflexive and auto-ethnographic approach grounded in our positionality as precarious, queer PhD candidates from Southern Italy (Barnao, 2023; Bourdieu, 2022). We analyze the development and effects of a monthly online meeting space created at the end of 2025 as a response to shared experiences and needs within academic institutions.

Empirically, we examine three interrelated dimensions of this practice.

First, the space operates as a safe environment in which participants can articulate vulnerabilities, doubts, and experiences of exclusion without fear of evaluation or reputational damage. Speaking openly about failure, exhaustion, or insecurity suspends dominant performative norms and redistributes voice and legitimacy at the micro-level of academic interaction.

Second, the space functions as a collective site of decoding: participants make explicit the implicit norms governing academic evaluation, productivity, networking, and self-presentation. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, cultural capital, and symbolic power, we show how academic success depends on tacitly acquired dispositions and inherited resources. By unpacking these rules collectively, participants reduce epistemic asymmetries and transform institutional expectations into shared knowledge.

Third, the group operates as a counter-competitive infrastructure. By openly discussing rejections and structural constraints, participants challenge the individualized logic of comparison and cultivate practices of mutual recognition and solidarity. This occurs also through collaborative writing and participation in academic spaces extending beyond specific research topics, thereby unsettling dominant academic logics. Experiences of precarity and queer dislocation are reframed not as individual deficits, but as socially produced effects of field-specific power relations, mobilized as collective resources for solidarity, reflection, and democratic innovation.

Drawing on feminist theories of care, we conceptualize infrastructuring as the relational and material work of maintaining, repairing, and reconfiguring conditions that enable participation and critique. Care is constitutive of democratic innovation: it produces the relational ground through which marginalized subjects can inhabit the institution differently, challenge asymmetries, and renegotiate symbolic hierarchies. By foregrounding interdependence as a democratic condition rather than a deficit, these spaces enact what Tronto (2013) calls a “caring democracy” at the micro-political level.

This paper contributes to sociological debates on academic precarity, epistemic inequality, and democratization of higher education. Informal, digitally mediated practices, including mutual aid, attentive listening, and reciprocal care during early academic stages, create spaces in which emotions and lived experiences surface rather than remain silenced. These practices prefigure more inclusive academic cultures by reconfiguring everyday academic infrastructures from below.