STORIES OF WELLBEING, AGENCY AND REDUCING INJUSTICES



HEHD 2025 IN-PERSON COLLOQUIUM - WEDNESDAY, 12 NOVEMBER 2025 

University spaces - across classroom, campus and community - have the potential to contribute to the wellbeing and flourishing of students and their self-formation as critical, knowledgeable and compassionate citizens. Universities can enable students to expand and exercise their agency in making choices about their own and their families’ future lives, and to make contributions to better lives with less injustice in their societies. Understood in this way, universities can be spaces of repair and the making of reparative futures in which certain kinds of harm (personal, social, ecological, epistemic and historical) are no longer possible, enlarging and making futures now through our practices, imaginaries and ways of thinking about and doing critical higher education research. Rich narrative inquiry, storied methods and orality generate critical understandings of past and present injustices in people’s lives, while also generating knowledge of what is being done in and through our universities and what still needs to be done. Storied methods, broadly understood, are themselves potentially reparative spaces in context, enabling sensitivity and engagement with the complex empirical reality of people’s positions and lives, and with history.