Policy implementation at the margins: affect, agency, and boundary work in global democratic precarity

Global democratic precarity is reshaping how policies are interpreted, enacted, and resisted within higher education, particularly as universities confront polarization, austerity, and intensified scrutiny of academic labor. This autoethnographic study examines how policy implementation is experienced from the margins by tracing my journey as an international scholar with a visual impairment navigating U.S. academic institutions. Through critical autoethnography grounded in disability studies and critical policy analysis, I draw on personal narratives, institutional correspondence, reflective journals, and embodied accounts to illuminate how belonging and exclusion, access and erasure, and growth and vulnerability intersect within spaces of declining public investment and rising ideological hostility. The analysis highlights how affective and sensory experiences reveal the subtle yet powerful mechanisms through which democratic erosion is lived through inaccessible systems, shifting institutional priorities, and boundary work required to maintain legitimacy. Findings suggest that disability, precarity, and transnational identity offer unique epistemic vantage points for understanding policy enactment under conditions of democratic uncertainty. This study expands policy implementation scholarship by foregrounding marginalized positionalities as sources of theoretical insight and by demonstrating how autoethnography can capture the affective and structural complexities shaping contemporary academic life. It argues for more humane, inclusive, and democratically grounded approaches to policy and institutional practice.