Embodied Academic Identities in the Hybrid University: A Global Socio-spatial Justice Framework for an Inclusive Higher Education

Abstract

Digital and neoliberal developments have remodelled higher education into a hybrid socio-technical environment in which physical campuses, accelerated schedules, digital platforms, and data-driven governance jointly organise academic work. The central problem is not inaccessible campus design or algorithmic control in isolation, but their institutional entanglement: digital metrics and platform rules increasingly shape where, when, and how academic bodies must be present, visible, responsive, and productive. These arrangements disproportionately burden disabled, racialised, gendered, classed, precariously employed, and caregiving academics. Although academic identity scholarship has examined discourse, cognition, professional socialisation, and cultural mobility, its physical, temporal, embodied, and algorithmic dimensions remain insufficiently integrated. This conceptual article uses a critical integrative review and iterative thematic synthesis of 24 purposively selected sources published between 1991 and 2024. The analysis is global in conceptual scope, with particular relevance to resource-constrained and Global South higher education systems. It integrates socio-spatial justice and Lefebvre's production of space triad with relational disability theory and critical scholarship on datafication, learning analytics, platformisation, and algorithmic performance management. The resulting framework conceptualises academic identity as an embodied socio-spatial achievement formed through interactions among conceived space (policies, metrics, platform governance, and AI rules), perceived space (campus design, timetables, interfaces, and everyday practices), and lived space (belonging, vulnerability, fatigue, recognition, and agency). It shows how apparently neutral norms of speed, omnipresence, and frictionless mobility reproduce unequal recognition and participation across campus and platform contexts. The article concludes that accessibility, temporal equity, digital rights, and embodied wellbeing should be treated as constitutive of academic identity, participation, and educational quality.