Dare to think diverse: an engaged ethnography on community within higher education

This article explores how community is enacted within higher education through the case of Durf Divers Denken (DDD), a grassroots platform at Ghent University. Within a neoliberal university, approaches to diversity often depoliticise inequality, reducing it to categories and policy rhetoric while leaving structural conditions intact. DDD foregrounds dialogue, solidarity, and critique, creating spaces where students and staff reflect. Drawing on engaged ethnographic fieldwork, we examine community as a relational process. Two vignettes illustrate how encounters, recognition, and critical reflection open possibilities for alternative ways of being within a university. Using bell hooks's Teaching Community alongside Ahmed's theorisation of institutional belonging, the analysis identifies three movements: relational coming together, collective reflection and shared commitment, and moving in and with. These reveal tensions between the logics of a neoliberal university and the slow, affective labour of community-making, highlighting how grassroots initiatives expose and resist the conditions that make such labour necessary.