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Paper short abstract

This paper takes an affirmative critique towards the future of the Higher Education sector by providing ways in which disabled anthropologists are enacting infrastructural activism in their university institutions through occupying 'the undercommons', providing crip spaces.

Paper long abstract

Today, the global higher educational (HE) sector is arguably in crisis. Many readings of the university can be characterised as ‘paranoid’ toward the future of the HE sector, inciting fear in current scholars and postgraduate researchers. Moreover, universities are rarely theorised from an infrastructural perspective. This paper will provide an infrastructural lens, arguing that certain infrastructures in university institutions can be changed through everyday human engagement and are intrinsically shaped by socio-political forces in societies. This paper takes an affirmative critique towards the future of the HE sector by providing ways in which disabled anthropologists are enacting infrastructural activism in their university institutions. I outline one example of infrastructural activism. How disabled anthropologists occupy ‘the undercommons’, these networks act within and against the university institution providing crip spaces whereby toolkits can be effectively spread, amongst disabled academics, to make HE spaces more inclusive. I conclude this paper with the importance of cherishing acts of infrastructural activism towards a more hopeful reading of the HE sector’s future.