Pressures on universities worldwide that are displacing spaces and practices of solidarity from the ‘within’ to the ‘outside’ of academic institutions, are increasing worldwide, most notably in countries such as Hungary (Dönmez & Duman, 2021; Cantat et al 2021; Cook et al. 2023), Turkey (Safta-Zecheria, 2021) and the United States of America (see Burton et al, forthcoming), among many other contexts. However, in European and Latin American contexts, higher education inclusion is still still mostly seen as a desirable policy horizon (in relation to the sustainable development goal 4) that universities and education policy makers should strive towards. However, what exactly is meant by academic inclusion is still a matter of debate, as is the implementation of an inclusion agenda in the context of recurring and extensive austerity measures that affect educational budgets. In this paper, we explore the tensions between two modalities of understanding inclusion in higher education: intercultural universities (hereafter IU; Dietz, 2009; Dietz et al., 2025; Mateos-Cortés & Dietz, 2025) as specific for an approach promoted in Latin America and most specifically Mexico from the beginning of the 2000s, and Universal Design of Learning  (heareafter UDL) in Higher Education that has been promoted as an inclusion framework in a similar timeframe mostly in English speaking contexts (see Quirke et al 2023). Whereas UDL (see CAST, 2025) is built on principles of universalism, operationalizing learning contexts in a structured way promoting the creation in learning contexts of multiple ways of engagement, representation and action and expression thus seeking to incorporate difference as a resource in learning. Although questions of identity, language, symbols and knowledge circulation, as well as interaction, expression and communication are addressed, the answers given to the questions are rather basic – inclusion is performed by attending to the process of learning rather than attending to what is learned and where. While UDL is not an equity (or social justice) framework per se (Rao et al, 2023), it nevertheless seeks to address the needs of both sensorially, physically, culturally, linguistically and otherwise diverse learners, conceived of as individuals, in a shared framework and has been long associated with the tradition of the social model of disability (see Shakespeare, 2017) . At the same time, intercultural universities cater mostly to indigenous and/or highly marginalized students, perceived and treated as historically excluded communities (Mateos-Cortes, 2017), and are based on an ecology of knowledge approach (de Sousa Santos, 2024) that inscribes knowledge and its circulation differently. In this context, investigating how these different approaches work in practice to facilitate inclusion and how these processes of inclusion travel within the biographies of graduating students beyond the university and in relation to their communities is of paramount importance for crafting a social justice-informed culturally, disability and socio-materially sensitive vocabulary for opening up and transforming the university.

We are still in the process of developing the research design. However, by collaboratively investigating the policy and project-based trajectory towards inclusion of two public universities: one based in Latin America, Mexico and one based in Europe, Romania, we seek to show how different questions surrounding inclusion were and are being dealt with from within different transformational logics and show how they produce both inclusions and exclusions. As such, we seek to investigate how the process of inclusion is framed by university policies and (former) leadership, and how it is experienced by students, graduates, teachers and other stakeholders. These observations will be complemented with autoethnographic and institutional ethnographic reflections as well as with workshops carried out with the mentioned stakeholders. Thus, our methodology builds on both southern European and Latin American traditions and experiences of participatory action research and of collaborative ethnography. The authors’ positionalities as persons involved with different forms of institutional transformation put us in a privileged position to reflect on this tense process of inclusion and exclusion and get a common understanding of such integration process in public universities.

As the research is only at an incipient stage, we have not yet formulated conclusions. However, we hope to formulate a set of questions that can be asked in higher education contexts to develop social justice-informed transformations that enable a common understanding of the academic inclusion process (needs assessment and opportunities for underserved groups) / towards enabling more and more meaningful academic inclusion of underserved groups.

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