Reclaiming Micro-Spaces of Agency and Network Generativity in Higher Education

The chapter proposes a discursive-material analysis of more-than-human governance in the Italian and Danish university systems, with a focus on how the overall academic organisation and its policies fragment and impoverish educational work, regulate university life through digital tools, and constrain teachers’ practices with limiting logics. A close reading of the four vignettes presented reveals, nevertheless, that micro-spaces of agency sometimes emerge by fissures and contingencies, allowing for the development of sensibilities and processes that resist the system’s control-oriented logic. Albeit partial, isolated, and fragile, these generative networks can become meaningful spaces of antagonistic governance, where alternative priorities can begin to be negotiated.