Students Are the System: Affective and Relational Infrastructures of e-Learning in the Global South

• In Event: Digital Transformation in Global Higher Education: Opportunities, Constraints, and Student Perspectives

Proposal

This paper explores how students across Global South universities became the affective and relational infrastructure sustaining learning during the COVID-19 emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL) period. Drawing on focus group data from 111 students at eight institutions participating in the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program e-Learning Initiative, we trace how students navigated systemic breakdowns in connectivity, instructional support, and mental health care through improvisational practices of care, connection, and co-responsibility. Rather than treating support as a top-down institutional provision, we theorize it as a relational infrastructure — a constellation of affective labor, social improvisation, and hybrid network-building that made learning possible under conditions of abandonment. We draw on feminist theories of care, critical infrastructure studies, and postdigital theory to argue that students did not merely survive ERTL; they worlded new educational possibilities through WhatsApp groups, peer mentoring, emotional check-ins, and distributed tech support. These practices constituted emergent, affective infrastructures — messy, provisional, yet vital. By centering student voices and emotional landscapes, we propose a rethinking of what counts as educational infrastructure, who builds it, and how institutions might learn from these student-generated systems of support.

Authors

• Sandra Nabulega, Arizona State University

• Prince Kwarase

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University