Across European higher education, diversity and inclusion have become central policy concerns, yet institutional approaches often translate these commitments into managerial categories that depoliticise inequality and marginalise lived experience. In the context of multiple intersecting crises (social, political, ecological, and epistemic) questions arise about how knowledge is produced, whose knowledge counts, and how universities might act responsibly while remaining spaces of critique and care. This paper addresses these questions by exploring how community is enacted as a relational and epistemic practice within higher education.

The paper presents findings from an engaged ethnographic study of Durf Divers Denken (DDD), a grassroots platform at Ghent University that brings students and staff together to collectively reflect on structural exclusion, belonging, and diversity within the university. Rather than approaching community as a stable or harmonious entity, the study conceptualises community as an ongoing, contested process that emerges through encounters, dialogue, affective labour, and shared responsibility.

Drawing on bell hooks’s Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope as a theoretical lens, and informed by feminist, decolonial, and affect theory, the analysis examines how community functions not only as a social form but also as a mode of knowing and acting. The paper asks: How is community enacted within higher education through a grassroots initiative, and what conditions make such community possible in a context shaped by institutional logics of efficiency and performativity?

Empirically, the paper centres on two ethnographic scenes: an iftar gathering organised within a university department, and a participatory G-100 dialogue event on diversity and inclusive teaching. These scenes are analysed through close reading and collaborative interpretation, foregrounding how space, material arrangements, affect, and narrative shape collective engagement. Rather than seeking generalisation, the paper offers situated insight into how alternative forms of knowledge emerge through embodied and relational practices.

The analysis identifies three interconnected movements through which community is enacted:
(1) relational coming together, where gathering itself becomes a political and epistemic act;
(2) collective reflection and shared commitment, where lived experiences are articulated as meaningful knowledge that speaks back to institutional discourse; and
(3) moving in and with, capturing the slow, non-linear work of sustaining community and translating reflection into relational responsibility.

These movements illuminate tensions between institutional demands for measurable outcomes and the slow, affective labour required to build trust, recognition, and shared meaning. The paper argues that such grassroots spaces reveal the limits of dominant epistemologies within higher education, while simultaneously offering alternative ways of knowing that are relational.

By positioning community as a form of knowledge practice, this paper contributes to debates on the changing conditions and potentials of education research. It invites reconsideration of how universities might engage diversity not as policy rhetoric, but as a lived, collective, and transformative process that reconfigures what counts as knowledge, action, and responsibility in higher education.

The study employs an engaged ethnographic methodology, combining long-term ethnographic immersion with a political and ethical commitment to reciprocity, solidarity, and co-construction of knowledge. The first author was embedded within the DDD platform over a 15-month period (February 2023 – May 2024), participating in and co-organising meetings, workshops, and public events, while documenting both formal and informal moments of exchange. Data sources include fieldnotes, audio recordings, photographs, reflective writing, and collaborative discussions among the four authors. Two ethnographic scenes were selected for their evocative density and capacity to illuminate relational and affective dimensions of community-making. These scenes were not treated as illustrative anecdotes, but as analytical sites where theory and practice intra-act. Analysis involved close reading of the ethnographic material alongside bell hooks’s Teaching Community, informed by feminist, decolonial, and affect-oriented approaches to qualitative inquiry. Interpretation was shaped through collaborative dialogue among the authors, bringing together insider knowledge of the platform, expertise in disability studies and belonging, and attention to epistemic power relations.

The findings show that community within higher education emerges not through consensus or institutional design, but through ongoing relational labour that resists dominant logics of speed, efficiency, and outcome-orientation. The three identified movements demonstrate how community functions as an alternative epistemic space where lived experience, affect, and presence become sources of knowledge. By foregrounding community as a practice of knowing and acting, the paper highlights how grassroots initiatives can expose the limits of policy-driven diversity frameworks while offering relational and ethical alternatives. These findings have implications for education research concerned with knowledge production under conditions of polycrisis, suggesting the need to value slow, situated, and relational methodologies that remain accountable to lived realities.

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