Conference Program

Over the last decade, the European Union has increasingly adopted migration governance tools based on the externalization of border control that, while presented as emergency responses to migration flows, have produced systemic effects on the fundamental rights of people on the move. Among these effects, the erosion of the right to education for migrant and refugee children stands out as a particularly severe form of institutional carelessness: a structural failure to recognize and respond to the needs, vulnerabilities, and aspirations of the most fragile subjects caught within these governance regimes.

This paper analyzes the impact of these policies in the Euro-Mediterranean context, understood as a social and political border space, where access to educational contexts – understood here as the full continuum of educational participation, whether formal schooling or broader learning environments – is fragmented, conditioned by security logics, and often relegated to parallel and marginal measures. Drawing on the ethics of care literature and adopting an intersectional perspective, it is going to be examined how the spread of the hotspot approach has institutionalized a form of “care-less governance” that operates as a sorting and confinement mechanism at landing points, rendering children systematically invisible to regular educational systems.

In Greece and Italy, in particular, minors remain excluded from schooling for months due to infrastructural, linguistic, and organizational shortcomings. In third-country partner states, the situation is even more severe, as children are held in informal detention conditions incompatible with any form of education and access to schooling is conditioned by legal status, spatial segregation, and child labor. These conditions generate structural forms of educational segregation that are not incidental but are reproduced by design – the predictable outcome of policies that prioritize containment over care.

Framing these dynamics through the lens of the politics of care, this contribution argues that the normalization of educational exclusion in border zones constitutes a specific form of structural injustice, based on the systematic withdrawal of care from those who need it most. Care, in this reading, is not merely a relational or affective practice but a political and institutional responsibility. The absence of care in migration management and its consequences on access to education – be it deliberate or a result of negligence – reproduce cycles of intergenerational poverty, instability, and exclusion.

This paper calls for a radical rethinking of migration governance, one that moves beyond the logics of emergency and containment and recenters care as a foundational political principle, capable of protecting the right to education and, ultimately, the full spectrum of human rights for all people on the move.

Once the preserve of the White middle-class male and ‘unencumbered’ scholar, ‘Western’ academia has considerably diversified over the past fifty years. In particular, many students and academic staff now hold some form of caring responsibilities. Yet academic excellence continues to be associated with the ‘bachelor boy’ as Cartesian dualisms, which produce academic identities through a denial of emotional domestic, physical and domestic matters, still permeate academic cultures. The physical and normative dissociation of academia and care, already ingrained in the Cartesian ideals, is also reactualised through the (gendered) discourses of the managerial university and of intensive parenting (read ‘mothering’) – two ‘greedy institutions’ which surveillent and command undivided loyalty and full availability from the scholar and the parent. Such a climate has led to claims that Western, contemporary, academic cultures are masculinist, ‘careless’ or even ‘toxic’. While an ethics of care and care work are not the preserve of those ‘with caring responsibilities’, this group offers a unique lens to explore the way care/rs are positioned by/in academic cultures as they cannot easily renounce these.

The paper draws on several inter-related projects conducted in UK universities since 2010. These projects have involved conducting questionnaire surveys and interviews with a range of staff and students. Altogether, these projects have generated an important body of data regarding the experiences of student and staff carers in Higher Education and how these experiences are shaped by university policies and cultures and their ‘care regimes’. The paper uses the notion of the ‘space invader’ and of (gendered, classed, racialised) ‘care order’, ‘care regime’ and ‘care practice’, echoing in this Matthew’s and Connell’s similar distinction about gender, to conceptualise the relationship between care/rs and academia, and to provide an insight into the lives of carers, most of which are women. It focuses on three related aspects emerging from the data: the invisibilisation of care/rs, their mis/recognition and the intersectionality of their experiences, always mediated, inter alia, by gender, class and race. Ultimately, this paper is an attempt to further the development of a sociology linking areas of society and of people’s lives (in this case, care and academia) which have historically been constructed as mutually exclusive, pointing to the changes needed so that academia becomes more care-centric or ‘care-full’’.

In the contemporary neoliberal university, "academic excellence" is closely linked to the figure of the “Ideal Academic”: an individual expected to have total temporal availability, constant international mobility, and an uninterrupted record of high productivity. This model, however, relies on the myth of the "care-free" researcher—someone free from domestic responsibilities and personal dependencies. This figure is constructed as a "bodyless" subject, entirely detached from the physical and emotional demands of daily life. By rewarding only those who can sacrifice their personal time, the institution treats the researcher’s life as a linear resource rather than a complex human experience. This means that fundamental life realities—such as pregnancy, the management of a disability, the daily commitment of caring for an elderly parent, or the need for geographic stability in a system that often forces academic nomadism—are frequently viewed as 'interruptions' or failures, rather than natural parts of a professional career. This paper investigates the "care-blindness" within Italian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), exploring how institutional rules and discourses marginalize those who perform care work. Based on Marie-Pierre Moreau’s theoretical framework, this research examines how the Italian academic system treats care not as a universal human condition, but as a private obstacle to professional merit. This invisibility creates a deep tension between the daily lives of researchers and the rigid expectations of the institution. This gap disproportionately affects women and the "sandwich generation"—those simultaneously caring for children and elderly relatives. The study uses a comparative qualitative methodology to analyze three major Italian universities: the University of Padua, the University of Bologna, and the University of Trento. By reviewing Gender Equality Plans (GEPs), Positive Action Plans, and administrative regulations, the research maps different institutional responses to the "care crisis." While Padua and Bologna (as "mega-universities") show the friction between inclusive rhetoric and administrative rigidity, Trento stands out as a benchmark. It has formally established a "Student-Caregiver Status" and obtained "Family Audit" certification, showing a deeper integration of care into its institutional identity. The analysis reveals a significant "decoupling" between political intent and actual practice. While official documents celebrate diversity and work-life balance, career evaluation criteria (such as VQR and ASN standards) continue to penalize "non-linear" career paths. This failure reinforces gender inequality and professional insecurity. In conclusion, this work argues for a paradigm shift: moving beyond the basic rhetoric of "work-life balance" toward a Caring University model. The study proposes a standardized "Caregiver Status" to mitigate inequality, rebalance power dynamics, and finally recognize care as a core part of academic life rather than a hidden liability.

This paper investigates the “care-less university” paradigm from a feminist perspective. It argues that neo-liberal academic work is consistently built on disembodied subjects, removing bodily needs, vulnerabilities, and care responsibilities, with diverse effects along axes of gender, class, and ability.
Cuerpa in ricerca is a feminist collective that employs an embodied approach to academic research and praxis. It stems from a process of collective reflection rooted in bodily experiences and practices, in dialogue with “Western” feminist perspectives on care, social reproduction and the body (Pulcini 2020; Tronto 2015; Butler 2004; Federici 2004; Dalla Costa 1972; Del Re 2015) and decolonial feminist elaborations from the “Global South” (Segato 2023; Gago 2020; Anzaldua 1987; Lugones 2024; Bhattacharya 2017). The paper shows how university institutions tend to invisibilize the embodied dimension of academic work, especially of women and LGBTQAI+ scholars, thus affecting well-being, careers, permanence, and the possibility to establish healthy relationships with students and colleagues.
To counteract this tendency, the collective will discuss some practices of radical resistance to move from theory to praxis. We ask to rethink academia as a ‘care-full’ institution, capable of recognizing bodies as territories and territories as bodies (Cabnal 2019)– the academic body as interconnected thinking flesh. From this perspective, care emerges not as a private matter, but as an institutional responsibility and a transformative principle for an education that produces situated knowledge, citizenship, inclusion, participation, and self-determination.

This contribution presents a monitoring questionnaire developed within the activities of the CABES Committee (University Committee for Students with Special Educational Needs) at eCampus University, together with its first administration to students benefiting from the measures provided under the CABES resolution. The instrument was designed to collect information on the academic experience of students using the support measures offered by the University. It is explicitly conceived not as a tool for assessing academic performance, but as a device for institutional listening, aimed at understanding whether students feel supported, whether existing measures remain appropriate to their current needs, and whether revisions or new forms of support may be required. From this perspective, the questionnaire may be interpreted as a device of institutional care, consistent with a vision of the university as a “care-full” space, capable of recognising differentiated needs and translating inclusion into organisational practice (Moreau et al., 2025).

Methodologically, this is an ad hoc questionnaire for institutional monitoring, predominantly quantitative but with qualitative openings, consisting of 41 items organised into 9 sections: general information on the course of study; progression through the degree programme; use and effectiveness of the measures set out in the resolution; quality of teaching and learning materials; relationships with teaching staff and administrative services; emotional well-being and study experience; relationship with the CABES Support Office; currently perceived needs; and request for contact. The instrument combines closed questions, multiple-response items, frequency and rating scales, as well as optional open-ended questions, thus collecting both summary indicators and narrative elements useful for interpreting students lived experiences.

From a sociological perspective, the questionnaire frames university inclusion as a relational and organisational process, not reducible to formal access to compensatory measures alone (Cardano et al., 2021). Questions concerning academic progression, credits acquired, use of examination sessions, and the perceived causes of delays make visible the factors affecting students’ continuation in higher education, including health conditions, organisational difficulties, relationships with lecturers, family problems, and work commitments.

From a pedagogical perspective, the instrument investigates the adequacy of support measures in teaching activities and examinations, the quality of lessons, materials, recordings, and study supports, as well as the improvements that students consider necessary. The focus is therefore not limited to individual compensation but extends to the inclusive quality of the learning environment, in line with Universal Design for Learning and with approaches that take the variability of learning as a starting point for rethinking teaching practices and pedagogical mediation (CAST, 2024). The psychological dimension emerges in the sections devoted to psychological well-being and students’ quality of life, with particular attention to the emotional aspects of university experience. In this way, the instrument shifts attention from academic performance alone towards psychological well-being, belonging, and self-efficacy, recognised as central factors in students’ participation and persistence in higher education (Ryan & Deci, 2020; Thomas, 2012; Granieri et al., 2021).

Overall, the CABES questionnaire may be interpreted as a multidimensional device of institutional care, capable of transforming inclusion from a formal measure into a reflective and transformative practice within higher education.