Conference Program

The metaphor of the Ivory Tower suggests that academics’ ways of working have always been hidden from view, slightly mysterious. This has increasingly become the case post-pandemic, as more academics choose to work remotely, allowing us to even hide our practice from our colleagues. Despite the freedom to work flexibly there is also an increased notion of surveillance, with departments keeping track of the number of REF-able outputs, grant money secured, and enterprise projects completed. Due to recent articles that draw attention to the stress, burnout and quiet quitting that is happening among academics, some universities or departments have implemented initiatives to ‘support’ academics with managing mental health and well-being (Ahola et al., 2017; Hyatt, 2022). At my institution, as we approach REF2029, increasing focus has been placed on ‘helping’ us to produce 4* publications. Emails are sent asking us to report how many articles we are currently writing, which journals we hope to submit to, and what kind of support we need to help us with these outputs. Recently, my department has instituted CORS (Concentrated Research and Scholarship) weeks, once per term. Essentially, they are protected weeks that we are supposed to dedicate to research and writing. “Of course, normal work commitments must still be met in full” (internal email, 22/10/25). This innovation is a perfect example of something designed to promote productivity while ignoring the real-life commitments of staff, who are still required to handle their normal workload whilst also focusing on contributions to the financial gain and standing of the department.

This paper will draw on a sociomaterial approach to explore two examples of initiatives I have experienced that were designed to promote research productivity and academic writing. The first is the CORS week described above, the second is a writing day for early career researchers hosted by the British Academy. The concepts of breakdown and repair (Zhang, Oliver, Littlejohn & Henry, 2025) will be helpful in exploring how certain assemblages encourage and impede the development of a productive community. Zhang et al. (2025) stated that breakdowns can often reveal something deeper than technological problems – they can draw attention to issues within the environment that we take for granted and that might need to be challenged or repaired. The focus on repair allows us to see how some groups might repair or manage these barriers or challenges while others might not, revealing factors that might explain the sense of community achieved by different groups.

While writing retreats or groups are not particularly innovative (Mattsson et al., 2020), given our increasingly digitised and remote ways of working, perhaps they do seem progressive. Finding time to disconnect from our normal working lives, to stop checking our emails, to unplug from the false urgency of working in academia, to reconnect with a community of scholars, can help us to slow down and actually enjoy a creative element of academic work.

Designing, in a situated manner, how people work together constitutes a foundational condition for collective work to take on regenerative qualities (Cole, 2012; Toner et al., 2023), understood in systemic, bio-anthropo-psycho-socio-historical (Morin, 2021), and environmental terms. In a global context marked by interconnected complex challenges (Sarkar & Kotler, 2025), a polycrisis (Lawrence et al., 2022), collaboration between actors at different scales has become indispensable. Metadesign, – the design of the structures and processes through which people design together – emerges as a strategic lever for democratic organizational innovation.

Academia, as many other sectors, is not exempt from dysfunctions: its structural and procedural arrangements have crystallized over time and rarely been subject to intentional redesign. Such dysfunctions affect less privileged members asymmetrically (Ganugi & Marocchini, 2025), limiting their ability to fully express their potential and contributing to the reproduction of internal inequalities.

This article investigates ‘organizational design’ as a metadesign practice through the lens of the Organizational Compass model (Bucci, 2025), presenting its application within the 40th cycle of the PhD program in Design for Social Change at ISIA Roma. The Compass systematizes the organizational “How,” conceived as the intermediate space between the “Why” (purpose, vision, mission) and the “What” (products, services and systems). The “How” is articulated into six interrelated areas: Structure (the distribution of authority and responsibilities), Decisions (decision-making methods and tools), Participation (engagement and sense of belonging), Information (information flows and knowledge management), Resources (shared management of economic, spatial, and energetic assets), and Learning (feedback loops activating in response to emerging needs and project dynamics).

Ecosistemica is a design and research company that adopts systemic approaches to organizational processes and social innovation, with a focus on participatory design, self-governance, and regenerative practices. It constitutes the professional context in which the authors develop and apply their methodological frameworks. Unlike Ecosistemica’s consultancy practice, where intervention is conducted by external professionals, the case under investigation unfolds within a peer-to-peer context in which one of the authors is an active member of the doctoral group. The intervention thus takes the form of an emergent action-research process: not initially conceived as a formal experiment, but arising from a shared intention to make organizational processes clearer, more equitable, and more effective.

During the first year of implementation, several innovations were introduced: a fractal structure with explicit roles (leader, note-taker, facilitator), shared documentation standards, and feedback cycles at both individual (peer performance reviews) and collective levels (project retrospectives). The article analyzes these innovations, how they were introduced, and their early observable effects on individual well-being and collective effectiveness, ultimately asking what metadesign might offer as a practice of democratic innovation within an academic setting.

The study investigates underexplored factors related to mental health within the university context. The academic debate on mental health has focused primarily on the student community, while largely overlooking university staff.

In recent years, a growing number of studies have documented the presence, among faculty members and researchers, of symptoms associated with stress, anxiety, burnout and depression. These manifestations are frequently linked to profound organizational and systemic changes, including intensified competition, increasing contractual precariousness and implementation of productivity metrics together with expanded workload and spectrum of tasks and responsibilities. Within this context, a significant body of literature has concentrated on specific segments of the academic population (early career researchers), considered particularly exposed to such risks. In conjunction with this, other contributions have examined self-related dimensions of mental health, such as work‑related stress, with the aim of analysing its determinants and modes of expression.

This study asks how discourse on mental health unfolds within the university setting and examines its breadth and forms across the full range of academic staff. The investigation contributes to filling a gap in the literature and advancing the discussion on academics’ mental health that goes beyond the quantification‑oriented models (e.g. Job Demands–Resources framework) or unambiguous selection of the target.

While remaining attentive to well‑established aspects, such as risk factors, coping strategies and issues related to the potential stigma surrounding certain topics, the study situates the problematization of mental health within innovative interpretative frameworks aimed at: i) critically analysing the ambivalence of certain characteristics of academic work, such as its “vocational” and highly motivating nature; ii) investigating role transitions, which are considered particularly sensitive phases for mental health; iii) identifying initiatives aimed at protecting mental well‑being at the individual, leadership, group/departmental and organizational levels.

The study employs two well‑established tools in qualitative sociological research: focus groups and semi‑structured interviews. The cross-sectional analysis involves approximately 40 participants comprising the full range of academic staff at the University of Bergamo (PhD candidates, research fellows, researchers, associate professors, and full professors). The empirical exploration is accompanied by an interpretive‑constructivist analysis designed to capture conceptual convergences and divergences between individual perceptions of the topic, organizational planning, and pressures stemming from the broader socio‑institutional context in which academics work.

The expected findings aim to generate multi‑level impacts. The research seeks to set up a space for reflection on mental health within the specific institutional context under study, in order to contextualize individual perspectives and discursive patterns. The examination of recurring tensions makes it possible to both systematize organizational vulnerabilities (e.g. inadequate service provision) and unpack broader implications of academic culture for mental health (e.g. performance-oriented culture; funding shortages; precariousness). Finally, the study intends to bring to light proposals, initiatives, and targeted intervention policies grounded in academics’ lived experiences, shared observations, and derived more generally from the empirical results.

The resulting theoretical scaffolding will support the development of a constructive intra‑organizational dialogue to effectively guide decision‑making processes aimed at safeguarding mental health and reimagining a more sustainable academic culture.

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.

In a context marked by declining traditional forms of citizen participation in the public sphere, particularly voting (Canel & Luoma aho, 2018; Kumagai & Iorio, 2020), young people have become a central concern within academic debate (Grasso, 2016; Sloam, 2014). As the cohort that will sustain democracy in Europe, their lower electoral participation compared to previous generations calls into question the stability of representative democratic models.

Some research links youth abstention to a weaker sense of civic consciousness (Wattenberg, 2015). Other studies contend that young people are not disengaged as such but instead orient their participation towards alternative forms grouped under the concept of Citizen Engagement (Ekman & Amnå, 2012; Sloam, 2016; Theocharis & van Deth, 2018). From this perspective, what is observed is not a simple decline in participation, but a transformation of its repertoires.

In higher education, this transformation has been increasingly discussed under the concept of “student engagement”, which refers to the set of academic, social and civic activities through which students participate in university life (Groccia, 2018). Recent research highlights how student engagement is shaped by institutional opportunities, motivational factors and barriers that affect students’ willingness and capacity to participate in the university community (López-Navas, Homont & Alcoceba, 2025).

From a communicative perspective, this issue acquires additional relevance in the case of communication students. According to the theory of social mediation (Martín Serrano, 1977), communicative mediators play a crucial role in transforming social events into narratives that contribute to the reproduction or transformation of social structures. As future professionals responsible for producing public narratives, communication students are not only citizens in formation but also potential mediators capable of legitimising or questioning certain forms of civic participation.

Within this framework, this paper presents the pilot phase of an educational innovation project currently being developed at the Faculty of Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid. The project aims to design and test pedagogical strategies intended to strengthen students’ civic motivation, university participation and awareness of their future mediating role within the communicative system.

The research adopts a mixed sequential design. As a first step, a pilot study is being conducted to validate a questionnaire measuring attitudes towards electoral participation, alternative forms of student engagement, university participation and students’ self-perception as future communicative mediators.

The pilot phase aims to refine the measurement instrument and assess the internal coherence of its dimensions before its implementation in a broader sample of communication students. In a subsequent stage, qualitative interviews will explore students’ civic consciousness and reflexive positioning regarding their future professional role.

In parallel, the project develops participatory pedagogical activities based on active learning methodologies that encourage students to reflect critically on media narratives about youth participation and to explore their own role in the construction of public representations of civic behaviour.

As the project is currently in progress, this paper focuses on the conceptual framework, research design and pilot results, opening a dialogue with international scholars on how communication education can contribute to strengthening democratic participation within universities.

This contribution reflects on how the impact evaluation of the Professional Development constructed through the Erasmus+ project INSIGHT, can promote democratic innovation within the university culture. The project’s overall objective is to identify and promote inclusive university teaching strategies that enhance learning, participation, equity, and well-being for all students within a co-development perspective involving both students and teachers. By creating a community of practice within each partner institution the project also aims at promoting an inclusive and collaborative university culture, as a fundamental step to ensure the efficacy and sustainability of the project. The research team uses Guskey's impact evaluation model to support the transformative practice toward a democratization of both teaching methodologies and overall organization.

The framework (Damiani et al., 2024) is grounded in a contextualist epistemology that frames inclusion as the expansion of capabilities, agency, and empowerment within interconnected learning ecosystems (Morin, 2004; Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Sen, 1985). Inclusion can only be achieved through systemic and infrastructure changes informed by an idea of enhanced participation and democratic innovation in academia. Central to this innovation is an inclusive teaching device providing teachers with tools and reflective practices to achieve changes both in their class and among colleagues.

To implement and validate the inclusive teaching device a group of university professors was trained and supported in piloting the device. This paper presents the mechanism supporting implementation of the inclusive teaching device, specifically the Guskey’s impact evaluation model protocol.

According to Guskey, effective professional development evaluation requires collecting and analyzing data across five critical levels: participants’ reactions, participants’ learning, organization support and change, participants’ use of new knowledge and skills, and students' learning outcomes. The levels are hierarchical and interdependent; success at one level is generally necessary to achieve meaningful outcomes at the next. For instance participants need to be positively affected by professional development in order to learn from it, but their learning can often only be implemented if there is organization support, and so on.

Every step of INSIGHT implementation has been monitored through an impact assessment protocol, following the Guskey model. Data were collected before and after the training, to assess level one and two of the model. During the experimentation in university courses the project partners closely supported experimenting teachers through meetings, data collection tools and the establishment of a community of practice. This structure is not only necessary to ensure that effective changes will be made to instruction in target courses, but also aims to create, support and promote an inclusive and collaborative culture within partner universities, i.e. level three of the model. Level four and five were assessed throughout the experimentation phase collecting reflective tools from both teachers and students.

We will present data to show how the impact evaluation methodology applied has positively supported the inclusive teaching device implementation with a multiplying effect fostering greater inclusion and participation in targeted courses, triggering a process of transformation of existing power dynamics, limiting inequalities, and promoting a democratic university culture.

In this paper, a student-faculty research team share the findings and recommendations of interdisciplinary research conducted on alternative assessment at Athabasca University, a Canadian distance post-secondary institution. Conducted in partnership with the Athabasca University Student Union (AUSU), the 5-person research team of undergraduate students and faculty researchers initiated this university-wide, learner-centred research to understand how the use of alternative assessment might enhance undergraduate student learning. The participatory research design used a relational research methodology (Wilson, 2008) that centred decolonizing and equity lenses, with an explicit focus on Indigenous students, neurodiverse students and students with accommodations or accessibility needs.

The context of this study is the reality that student learning in post-secondary institutions continues to be predominantly assessed through the use of academic essays, multiple-choice and final, time-bound exams, and other standardized evaluations. While these mainstream approaches continue to be prevalent around the globe, a growing body of research suggests that these practices do not optimally measure students’ learning, nor contribute to student learning, growth and engagement (Abrahams, 2024). Additionally, traditional assessments are known to reproduce and/or exacerbate structural barriers for some learners, including Indigenous students, neurodiverse students, and students with accommodations or accessibility needs (Preston & Claypool, 2021; McDowall & Kiseleva, 2024). Finally, traditional assessments prioritize a Euro-centric knowledge system that devalues alternative knowledge traditions (e.g., Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, ITK), and enforces a top-down relationship or 'banking model of education' in which students are engaged as receptacles of teachings (Freire, 1970) determined by educators, and educational systems with minimal or no student input or consent (Simpson, 2017). In these systems, students not only have limited say in what or how they learn, they have no voice in how they might optimally demonstrate their learning, be assessed, or graded. In response to these challenges, alternative assessments have emerged as ways that students can demonstrate their knowledge in a diversity of ways, whilst also enhancing their learning and critical engagement with course materials. In Canada, as institutions look to advance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Calls to Action (2016), and address the pedagogical implications of emerging technologies such as AI, alternative assessment practices are viewed as offering promising pathways for innovation in teaching and learning.

This paper will provide an overview of the findings and recommendations of this study, whilst sharing insights that have emerged related to the implementation and integration of alternative assessment practices within post-secondary institutions. By examining alternative assessment through a participatory and relational research framework, this project contributes to broader discussions about democratic innovation in academia, and the advancement of critical, equitable, and decolonizing pedagogies. The paper will also reflect on how collaborative student–faculty research partnerships are a critical means by which democratic innovation within academic institutions might be advanced, facilitating student participation in the shaping of educational practices. The findings aim to directly enhance assessment practices at Athabasca University, while also contributing to international conversations about alternative assessment; critical and relationally accountable (Wilson, 2008) pedagogies; and learner-centred pedagogical research design.