A New Materialist approach to exploring minoritised undergraduate students experience of university systems and processes

Drawing on a collaborative, student-led research project at a UK university, this study adopted a diffractive methodology (Barad, 2007) to investigate how minoritised students experience the relational, material, and institutional flows of higher education. Through entangling artefact-making, spatial mapping, and collective reflection (Haraway, 1997), five key diffractive patterns shimmered through the inquiry: feedback and assessment, data sharing, relationships, space, and mentoring. Through tracing affective intensities and moments of blockage and flow, the study contributes to literature discussing how minoritised students navigate and reshape their educational landscapes. Anchored in New Materialist theory, and guided by an ethics of care (Noddings, 2013), this article foregrounds student voice not as testimony, but as an active force for institutional insight (Tronto, 1993). It argues that transformation begins not with largescale overhaul, but with attuned practices, ways of listening, noticing, and acting that reimagine belonging as something co-constituted, embodied, and alive

Higher education · Materialism · Qualitative research · Evaluation of Teaching Practices · Higher Education Practises and Engagement · Higher Education Research Studies