April 15th will include a full day of student presentations. The events will take place in McGill's IGSF seminar room (3487 Peel, 2nd floor).
The undergraduate honours students will present their thesis projects. The graduate students from WMST 602 will discuss their ongoing research projects.
The undergraduate honours students will present their thesis projects. The graduate students from WMST 602 will discuss their ongoing research projects.
Feminist Research Symposium 2026 Schedule
9:30-9:40: Welcome
Symposium organizers, Elizabeth Elbourne & Hasana Sharp
I. 9:40 – 11:00: Policy and the ethics of care
Chair: Natalie Stoljar, Philosophy
• Pengfei Cao, “Unheard Voices: Queer Chinese in the Diaspora -- Rethinking Support for Chinese International LGBTQ+ Students in Canada”
• Mathilde Genest, “The Underdiagnosis of Neurodivergent Women and Girls: A Feminist and a Bioethical Issue”
• Bianca Hutanu, “Trauma-Informed Approaches to Tattooing: Enhancing Mental Health Literacy and Ethics of Care”
• Andrés Valencia, “Relationality, Dissensus, and More-than-Human Futures: Seven Counter-Hegemonic Logics for the University of 2050”
10:40-11: Q&A
11:00-11:15: Coffee and snacks (provided by the IGSF)
II. 11:15-12:15: Queer temporalities
Chair: Dr. Alex Ketchum, IGSF
• Anouk Félix. “The Rise and Fall of Lesbian Spaces: Documenting and Reimagining the Notion of Lesbian Space through an Analysis of Montreal’s Lesbian Scene since the 1980s”
• Iulia Ganopolsky. “Be the Butch to My Femme: The Changing Relationship Between Lesbian Spaces and Identities in Montreal from the 1950s to the 1990s”
• Dan Levy, “Squinting With Your Ears: Re-Articulations of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Keyboard Fantasies”
12:00-12:15 Q&A
12:15-1:00: Lunch provided by IGSF (vegetarian and vegan options will be available)
III. 1:00-2:00: Gender and identity construction
Chair: Twisha Singh, South Asian Studies and IGSF
• Felicité Girard. “The Symbolic Power of Blondness: Constructing a Feminine Ideal Across Twentieth- Century Québécois Women’s Magazines”
• Inaya Huda, “Theorising Women as National Symbols: Postwar Bangladesh”
• Alisa Sanchez, “A Comparative Ethnography of Masculinity in Single-Sex and Co-Educational Schools”
1:45-2:00: Q&A
IV. 2:05-3:05: Feminism and technology
Chair: Maria Hwang, IGSF & East Asian Studies
• Jenna Brender. “How the Elites Date; A Digital Ethnography of Dating Culture amongst North America’s Top1%”
• Maddie Daniel. “Breaking the Ice: Expectations for LGBTQIA+ Corporate Advocacy in the Professional Women's Hockey League and the National Hockey League”
• Tashika Gomes, “A Feminist Policy Analysis of Canada’s AI Strategy and Bill C-27.”
2:50-3:05: Q&A
V. 3:10-4:30: The history and politics of the left in the late twentieth century
Chair: Judith Szapor, History
• Natasha Bronfman, “Learn Her: Gerda Lerner and the Establishment of Women’s History”
• Dina Lowe, “Gendered Narratives in Kazakhstan’s Post-Soviet Memory Landscape”
• Madison Albert, “Wages for Housework and Family Abolitionism; An Unhappy Marriage?"
• Despine Green, “The Temporality of Resistance Art: Fanon, the Medu Art Ensemble and Cultural Production”
4:10-4:30 Q&A
4:35-4:50: Closing Remarks
Elizabeth Elbourne & Hasana Sharp
________
Undergraduate Honours Thesis Presentations
Madison Albert. "Wages for Housework and Family Abolitionism; An Unhappy Marriage?"
This thesis interrogates the relationship between the 1970s Wages for Housework (WfH) movement and contemporary family abolitionism, asking whether family abolition is conceptually integral to WfH or analytically distinct from it. Recent abolitionist readings—most prominently Sophie Lewis—interpret WfH as logically committed to dismantling the nuclear family on the grounds that unpaid reproductive labour is constitutive of capitalist accumulation and male domination. Yet this inference presupposes that the historically specific nuclear family form is itself necessary to those structures. Drawing on foundational WfH texts by Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici, alongside contemporary social reproduction theory and abolitionist scholarship, I argue that WfH does not centrally entail family abolition. Rather, its support for family abolition is conditional and incidental to a more primary struggle over the valuation and coercion of unpaid reproductive labour. The thesis proceeds in three steps. First, it reconstructs and responds to the tension within WfH between its apparent critique of the family and its wage-based strategy, which risks reinscribing heteronormative divisions of labour. Second, it examines the charge of functionalism often leveled at family abolitionism: that it collapses the family into its capitalist function. Third, it will explore selected broader implications. By clarifying the conceptual stakes of conflating institutional form with structural function, the paper broadens the horizon of feminist political strategy beyond a false choice between family reform and family abolition.
Jenna Brender. How the Elites Date; A Digital Ethnography of Dating Culture amongst North America’s Top 1%
This thesis argues that dating among elite North Americans is not merely a personal or emotional endeavor, but a structured social practice through which class distinction is actively performed and sustained. Romantic choice, self-presentation, and notions of desirability are embedded in classed aesthetics, gendered expectations, and norms of exclusivity. Through dating (particularly within elite digital environments), participants reaffirm who belongs within elite circles and who does not. In this sense, intimacy functions as a mechanism of social reproduction, translating economic and symbolic capital into affective life. By examining elite dating culture ethnographically, this study contributes to feminist sociology and cultural studies by shifting analytical attention “upward,” toward populations that are often under-scrutinized yet disproportionately influential. It positions dating apps not as neutral tools of connection, but as cultural infrastructures that shape desire, visibility, and belonging along classed and gendered lines.
Natasha Bronfman. Learn Her: Gerda Lerner and the establishment of women’s history
This essay revisits the life and intellectual legacy of Gerda Lerner (1920 to 2013), a scholar widely recognised as a founding figure of Women’s History in the United States. As a Jewish refugee from fascist Europe, as an immigrant woman entering academia later in life, and as a lifelong activist committed to feminist and anti-racist struggles, Lerner developed a historical methodology that rejected claims of objectivity and insisted on centring marginalised perspectives. Her scholarship challenged the exclusion of women from historical narratives and questioned the epistemological foundations of the historical discipline itself. This project argues that Gerda Lerner’s feminist historical method cannot be understood apart from her lived experiences of displacement, political struggle, and institutional exclusion. Rather than treating biography as background context or inspiration, I position Lerner’s life as central to her intellectual vision. Her formative years in Red Vienna, her forced exile under Nazism, her years of political activism and working-class labour in the United States, and her eventual entry into the male-dominated institution of academia all informed her critique of power and her insistence that history is never neutral. By tracing how Lerner translated lived experience into historical method, this thesis seeks to illuminate the relationship between feminist knowledge production and institutional resistance, both in Lerner’s time and in the present.
Maddie Daniel. “Breaking the Ice: Expectations for LGBTQIA+ Corporate Advocacy in the Professional Women's Hockey League and the National Hockey League”
Sports always have been, and always will be, politically contentious. The advent of social media platforms such as Instagram has led to new opportunities for athletes, teams, and leagues to broadcast stances on social justice issues to large audiences. This thesis focuses on this development between January 1st, 2024, and January 1st, 2026, within both of North America’s premier hockey leagues, which are the National Hockey League (NHL) and the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL). More specifically, it looks at how these leagues, as corporate enterprises, utilize Instagram (a social media platform) to send messages related to LGBTQ+ issues to their respective follower bases, and how these messages are received by these follower bases. To this end, the dominant league cultures of each organization, which are intrinsically gendered, connected with the presence/absence of out LGBTQ+ players and why fans watch each league, shape expectations for LGBTQ+ content that subsequently influence fans’ emotional responses and perceptions of authenticity regarding said content. Ultimately, this thesis aims to contribute to existing literature at the intersection of professional athletics and social justice to the extent that the authenticity of and emotional responses to corporate LGBTQ+ messaging on social media platforms like Instagram are not just determined by the messaging itself, but the cultural contexts that shape audience expectations.
Anouk Félix. “The Rise and Fall of Lesbian Spaces: Documenting and Reimagining the Notion of Lesbian Space through an Analysis of Montreal’s Lesbian Scene since the 1980s”
Since the 1980s, the golden age of lesbianism in Montreal, all physical lesbian spaces have closed. If some ephemeral and short-lived spaces have seen the day since, the landscape of the lesbian scene has considerably changed. Therefore, this research project interrogates the reasons for this change while attempting to expand the notion of lesbian space. I start by documenting the history of lesbian spaces in Montreal, then delve into the causes and impacts of their evolution, to finally provide a reimagined definition of lesbian space. Drawing on archival materials and existing scholarship, my thesis examines how lesbo-queer history and politics, social geography, and socio-economic conditions have reshaped forms of lesbian community and visibility. Ultimately, I argue that lesbian spaces are not only physical places but also dynamic clusters evolving spatio-temporally.
Iulia Ganopolsky. “Be the Butch to My Femme: The Changing Relationship Between Lesbian Spaces and Identities in Montreal from the 1950s to the 1990s”
Lesbian spaces in Montreal have historically been fluid and self-reflexive sites for community, identity and political redefinition. Through such spaces have percolated a plethora of discourses which have centered certain identity politics and gender performances while marginalizing others. In particular, butch/femme culture has been repeatedly redefined as out-dated, heteronormative, and oppressive relational structures of the past. This work questions the changes in lesbians spaces, between the 1950s and 1990s, in how they have been organized, in inclusive or exclusive ways, along linguistic, racial and class lines. It also investigates the ideological discourses existing within these spaces and how they have aided to construct spaces, identities and communities. Ultimately, through the use of archival sources, including yellow press journals from the 1950s and 1960s, lesbian periodicals, and photographs, this work considers the place butch/femme roles and identities held within these spaces and discourses, and how understandings of these roles and identities are shaped by linguistic, racial and class differences. By employing theoretical notions of gender performativity, female masculinities, and queer geographies, this research aims to understand butch/femme aesthetics, politics and desires throughout time and space, while also thinking about how this knowledge can inform a desire to rebuild inclusive lesbian spaces in Montreal.
Felicité Girard. “The Symbolic Power of Blondness: Constructing a Feminine Ideal Across Twentieth- Century Québécois Women’s Magazines”
This thesis explores the symbolic construction of blondness in 20th-century advertisements in the Québécois women’s magazines La Revue Moderne and Châtelaine. A mixed-methods approach compared representations of blonde and brunette women across 506 advertisements published between the 1920s and 1990s. Through quantitative coding and qualitative discourse analysis, this study reveals that blondness was historically produced as an aspirational and hegemonic form of femininity deeply intertwined with gendered, classed and racialized ideals. While blondes were less visible than brunettes, their disproportionate representation in beauty advertisements reinforced their symbolic elevation as an enduring beauty standard, in contrast to the traditional femininity embodied by brunettes. The repeated association of blonde women with status, admiration, whiteness, youth and hegemonic ideals further revealed the symbolic power of blondness as a component of an ultimate feminine ideal that is socially rewarded in a political economy of embodiment. From these findings, the cultural popularity of blonde hair dyeing can be understood as much more than a trivial beauty practice, but as a process of self-regulation disguised as self-expression in a restrictive and disciplinary beauty regime.
____________
Graduate Student Presentation Abstracts
Pengfei Cao: “Unheard Voices: Queer Chinese in the Diaspora -- Rethinking Support for Chinese International LGBTQ+ Students in Canada”
This research project focus on Chinese queer international students’ lived experiences and how they perceive the existing support initiatives on campus and inside the community. By using Queer Asia as Method (QAM), we reimagine Queering China as main approach to understand what forms of violence, exclusion, or marginalization they experience within West-defined 2SLGBTQIA+ spaces. This project draws on the more specific way to examine how Chineseness, queerness, and immigration status specifically intersect, emphasizing that Chinese and queer identities are negotiated simultaneously and strategically, not sequentially or in opposition to each other.
The information is gathered through second-handed data analysis of the articles that have covered similar finding of respectively Chinese as well as Asian queer, international student community. Through this research project, we highlight how Chinese queer international students are often neglected while identifying what factors shape their perceptions of existing support initiatives and what leads to their decision of help-seeking strategies.This project is not meant to disparage and police various forms and expressions of Chinese queer diasporic existence but to seek to center the silenced voices and lived experiences. Considering what it means to be queer, Chinese, and diasporic in white settler-colonial society, this research project will show how there are more inclusive, culturally relevant ways to support for the sizable but unheard community of Chinese queer international students.
Mathilde Genest, “The Underdiagnosis of Neurodivergent Women and Girls: A Feminist and a Bioethical Issue”
In comparison to men and boys, women and girls are less likely to be diagnosed as neurodivergent, and if they are, it tends to be later in life. Neurodivergent girls and women are underdiagnosed. This presentation argues that it is not only a feminist issue but also a bioethical one. First, I adopt a feminist perspective. I start by presenting some contributing factors to girls and women’s underdiagnosis, describing the male model of neurodivergence, and explaining the impacts of gender on neurodivergence and vice-versa. Then, I explore the framework of epistemic injustices in relation to the underdiagnosis of neurodivergent girls and women. Second, I present the bioethical framework of principlism and apply it. This reframing allows me to expand on the harms linked to the epistemic injustices previously presented and to include other harms experienced by neurodivergent girls and women due to their underdiagnosis. The double framework of epistemic injustice and principlism gives a fuller picture of the harms linked to the underdiagnosis of neurodivergent girls and women. Some of the main harms fall into the principle of non-maleficence. Not receiving a diagnosis is linked to negative outcomes for neurodivergent girls and women poor mental health, negative self-perceptions, risk-taking behaviours, experiences of trauma, social difficulties, and testimonial injustices. Importantly, applying the principle of beneficence shows us the positive consequences of a diagnosis for neurodivergent girls and women. Hence, they are harmed because they are not benefiting from positive outcomes such as hermeneutical breakthroughs, improvements in social relationships, and increases in self- esteem. The underdiagnosis of neurodivergent girls and women hinders the flourishing of their autonomy when a diagnosis fosters it through self-understanding, re-authoring their lives, and an increased sense of control. Finally, the principle of justice highlights the epistemic injustices as intrinsically wrong and gender inequality.
Tashika Gomes, “A Feminist Policy Analysis of Canada’s AI Strategy and Bill C-27.”
In 2017, Canada became the first country to launch a national artificial intelligence strategy, prioritizing investment in research and talent development. In 2022, this strategy expanded to include responsible AI and commercialization alongside the introduction of the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) within Bill C-27. Since then, Canada’s approach to AI governance has evolved through consultations and strategic updates, but legislative progress has stalled due to the prorogation of Parliament in January 2025.
This paper conducts a critical, intersectional feminist policy analysis of Canada’s AI strategy, AIDA, Bill C-27, and 32 reports submitted by 28 AI Strategy Task Force members. I examine how innovation, responsibility, and public protection are articulated across these documents, with a focus on policy language, funding priorities, and equity provisions for marginalized groups. The analysis identifies key tensions, omissions, and patterns across these materials, offering insight into how AI governance is currently being shaped and whose interests it centers or excludes.
Despine Green, “The Temporality of Resistance Art: Fanon, the Medu Art Ensemble and Cultural Production”
The work of Frantz Fanon presents us with interesting reflections on the relation between colonised temporality, aesthetic production and the invention of the new human. In this paper, I present an account of Fanon’s reflections on colonised temporality in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Wretched of the Earth (1961) which sees the colonised being locked in a continuous present, without histories or futures of significance that can be taken up authentically as their own. The intervention that Fanon presents is the introduction of invention into life, making real the possibility of choice for the colonised as a collective practice aimed at transforming the social situation. Part of the practice Fanon highlights is the development of new forms and uses of cultural production which evince a new kind of temporality beginning to make itself known through art as it engages with other parts of political struggle. After discussing this account, I use examples of resistance culture from the Medu Art Ensemble and show how they reflect this new temporality. The Medu Ensemble were a collective of cultural workers active in the anti-Apartheid struggle in the early 1980’s, based out of Gaborone, Botswana who worked across a range of media. By focusing on their posters (many of which reproduced in Antawan I. Byrd and Felicia Mings, The People Shall Govern! (2020)), I argue that their use of screen-printing, assemblage and collage represent a critical reformulation of colonised temporality aimed at furthering the development of the new human active in struggle.
Inaya Huda, Theorising Women as National Symbols: Postwar Bangladesh
This paper examines how symbolic femininity operates as a constitutive mechanism within nationalist projects, focusing on the aftermath of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Marked by genocidal tactics, including the mass rape of hundreds of thousands of women, the war produced a social and political context in which gendered violence became materially and symbolically central to the nation’s formation. As a result, Bangladesh offers a uniquely instructive case for analysing how women’s bodies and images become embedded in the narration of national identity and moral order. Drawing on feminist theories of nationalism and cultural-sociological accounts of collective identity and cultural trauma, this essay argues that symbolic femininity can function as a primary mechanism through which nations in their early stages negotiate legitimacy and collective identity. By bringing these frameworks into conversation, the analysis shows how gendered symbolism operates not only at the level of discourse but as a mechanism through which national meaning is stabilised and made politically consequential.
Bianca Hutanu, “Trauma-Informed Approaches to Tattooing: Enhancing Mental Health Literacy and Ethics of Care.”
Literature from the past decade has shown an increased interest in tattoos as a means of identity expression, and bodily reclamation, particularly those with histories of trauma, which shifts away from the previous negative narratives and stigmatization within the modern Western world. Historically, some Indigenous communities, such as the Cherokee or Inuit, incorporated tattooing as a culturally significant practice that was supressed through generations of longstanding colonial violence, and Native dispossession (Honma & Francoso, 2023). Documenting these histories have helped artists, such as Cherokee artist John Henry Gloyne, reimagine the practice outside of the reducible distorted optics and constrains of the settler state, but also reclaim this practice. Motivations and meanings vary, yet instances of correlation of tattooed bodies with mental health are not secular; research on this has demonstrated questions of embodied storytelling and body reclamation are also explored amongst survivors of human trafficking and harmful branding practices, the correlation between tattooed individuals and the increased rates of suicidality, as well as the association with childhood abuse or neglect and tattooing. In light of these findings, while tattooing can serve as a site of healing for clients, questions arise on the tattoo artist’s practices, role within ethics of care, and their psychological impact of engaging with stories of pain, grief, and resilience, such as potential secondary or vicarious trauma. Artists often learn the technical practice through apprenticeships or informally; there is no standardization of the practice, which can limit knowledge sharing and create challenges for the artist’s and client’s wellbeing and safety.
This study aims to develop a potential framework that could support community-based learning, mental health literacy, and ethical practice among tattoo artists, guided by trauma-informed and anti-oppressive practices.
Dan Levy, “Squinting With Your Ears: Re-Articulations of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Keyboard Fantasies” (1986)
It has now been a decade since composer and Black trans elder Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s legendary “rediscovery” through a cassette of his 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies. During this time, Glenn-Copeland has come to figure possibilities larger than himself for his newfound queer and trans devotees: of long life, intergenerational trans care, and recognition for Black trans culture-makers. The making of a cultural icon, however, invites ascriptions of value through singularity over coalition and connection. Accordingly, journalistic narratives often reinscribe Glenn-Copeland’s work within the periphery of the “uncategorizable” and the genre-defying. I interrogate these narratives of rediscovery and exceptionalism, asking how, why, and by whom Keyboard Fantasies has been taken up. I approach the album not merely as an artifact of the ‘80s or the material site of Glenn-Copeland’s “rediscovery,” but as a work of cultural production which takes on meaning through the temporal breaks which characterize its reception. Through analysis of the material conditions which animated and attended the album’s initial production, I explore submerged and foreclosed articulations between Black electronic music and indie music cultures of the mid-80s. Then, I examine the ways in which Keyboard Fantasies has been adopted by queer and trans musicians, particularly in contemporary queer indie scenes. Following Glenn-Copeland’s own phenomenological metaphor for listening to synthesized sounds, I suggest that by “squinting with our ears,” we can orient ourselves to better listen for sites of both affinity and alienation.
Dina Lowe: Literature Review for Thesis Titled "Gendered Narratives in Kazakhstan’s Post-Soviet
Memory Landscape"
This literature review surveys four bodies of scholarship relevant to the study of gendered memory in post-Soviet Kazakhstan: Soviet gender policy in Central Asia, women’s experiences of Stalinist repression, post-Soviet nation-building and femininity, and memory studies. These fields reveal that while scholars have extensively examined both gender and commemorative practices in the post-Soviet space, the two areas have rarely been brought into direct dialogue in the Kazakhstani context. Research on Soviet gender policy shows that women's emancipation was deeply entangled with colonial modernization, which had unique impacts in predominantly Muslim areas of Soviet Central Asia. Gendered studies of Stalinist repression demonstrate that women were frequently targeted through kinship and familial roles rather than individual political acts. Work on post-Soviet nation-building shows that governments across Central Asia have institutionalized idealized femininities centered on motherhood and moral guardianship as tools of national cohesion. Memory studies, meanwhile, establish that commemorative sites function as intentional state practices that construct political meaning. This review finds that despite this rich body of work, gender remains underexplored as a strategic and structuring element within Kazakhstan's politics of remembrance. Notably, unique historical sites such as ALZhIR, (The Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland), a museum in Astana, Kazakhstan which memorializes solely female prisoners of Soviet repression, has received limited scholarly attention as an explicitly gendered commemorative space.
Alisa Sanchez, “A Comparative Ethnography of Masculinity in Single-Sex and Co-Educational Schools”
Elite schools increasingly frame themselves around inclusion, civility, and character development, yet subtle gendered hierarchies continue to structure peer life beneath these formal commitments. This project examines how masculinity is performed and regulated among early adolescent boys in elite school settings, with particular attention to practices such as irony, mock aggression, and ostensibly playful forms of interaction. Drawing on and departing from C.J. Pascoe's influential account of "fag discourse," preliminary pilot ethnography at one elite Montreal boys' school suggests that explicit homophobic policing may be receding, displaced not by greater equality, but by a different idiom. Boys deployed humor centered on assault, sexual misconduct, and racial stereotyping as mechanisms for boundary-drawing and status regulation, carefully calibrating their jokes to remain just within institutional tolerance. While scholarship on masculinity frequently centers older adolescents, boys in Grades 7 to 9 at elite Canadian schools remain understudied despite occupying a formative period in which gender norms and status hierarchies are actively co-constructed. I will expand on this project through a comparative ethnography across two Anglophone elite schools in Montreal — one all-boys, one co- educational — investigating how institutional structures shape these performances and how boys navigate formal expectations around maturity and inclusion. Fieldwork will include participant observation, go-along ethnography, and interviews with students and staff across one academic year. This project contributes to the sociology of education, youth studies, and masculinity studies by highlighting how gendered power persists through ambiguous and institutionally tolerated practices, and how boys learn to navigate hierarchy under the language of civility and leadership.
Andrés Valencia, “Relationality, Dissensus, and More-than-Human Futures: Seven Counter-Hegemonic Logics for the University of 2050”
Universities are being reshaped by intersecting, simultaneous, and mutually reinforcing crises, such as the climate emergency, democratic erosion, rising authoritarianism, anti-gender ideologies, the rollback/shrinking of public funding, and technological disruption. These interdependent crises will transform universities by 2050. Yet institutional futures work rarely centers on sensory regimes and logics away from Western aesthetics. This presentation showcases a Qualitative Research Synthesis of seven university logics—the Ubuntu or decolonial, the ethically engaged, the slow, the plastic, the troublemaker, the pluriversity, and the queer university—whose designs push against global capitalism cultural hegemony and its systemic dysfunctions: faculty alienation, erosion of autonomy, academic labor audit, overreliance in key performance indicators, organizational isomorphism, blind technocracy, top-down management hierarchies, intolerant departmental monocultures, the fetishization of efficiency, among others.
The presentation addresses three questions: 1) What critiques are made of the neoliberal, managerial university? 2) What are their proposals seen from an epistemic, ontological, and axiological lens? And, 3) What can these designs/logics contribute to reenvision future universities in the 2050-time horizon, beyond patriarchal, colonial, polluting, and racist aesthetics? Preliminary findings indicate that knowledge is reconceptualized as deeply relational, slow, and rooted in unlearning and processes of becoming. Feminist and decolonial perspectives push this further, advocating dissensus, hyper-self-reflexivity, and a rejection of extractive, objectifying epistemologies. In ontological terms, profound ontological ruptures that dismantle the Western anthropocentric divide between human and nature are advocated. Indeed, these logics call for an ontology that repositions the university within ecological interconnectedness and recognizes nonhuman beings as more-than-human relatives. While, in axiological terms, counter-hegemonic university logics prioritize care, justice, and ecological survival over efficiency, foregrounding intellectual virtues such as truthfulness, patience, compassion, and open-mindedness. The presentation closes with some reflections on the universities of the future, arguing that securing a sustainable future for higher education requires more than technological innovation or administrative restructuring.