VISIBLE CARE – What could an inclusive, caring institution be for student-parents? A Critical Design Inquiry into Institutional Practices of Inclusion and Care.
Aiming to foster socially sustainable and positive change, this design project addresses the challenges pregnant and parenting students face in academia. Stigma, lack of institutional support, isolation, and stress often contribute to academic withdrawal and increase the dropout rate among these students.
This project is inspired by my own journey as a pregnant and parenting student during my studies. It shines a light on the marginalisation and invisibility of parenting students and critically addresses the specific challenges encountered and gaps in the supportive policies at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden.
The process integrates visual autoethnography and non-intrusive participatory methods to highlight systemic policy gaps and advocate change, employing social design principles and a practice-based research approach. By documenting personal experience through visual autoethnography and developing accessible forms of participation, the project seeks to raise awareness, recognise key barriers and foster dialogue to push for policy reform that supports the academic success of parenting students.
“I recognise how the experiences of caregiving students are often excluded from institutional narratives. This invisibility highlights the exclusionary ways of seeing, how the dominant perspectives shape what should be visible and whose realities should be acknowledged”
To encourage participation, I created a low-barrier engagement tool, such as an interactive board in a public space at the university. This allowed students to anonymously express their support and challenges and highlight the issue’s collective nature. Additionally, I designed three different types of badges for parenting and non-parenting students; these badges served as a tool for visibility and presence.
Inspired by my embodied experience of being pregnant and parenting students while studying, exploring embodied design methods and feminist care theory, I created the empathy jacket. The concept of the empathy jacket was that we do not just think through our minds, but also our bodies. I wanted others, such as non-parenting students, to experience and feel what it means to carry care and ambition, not just through discussions, but through their bodies.
“Care shifts its form- but it never goes away”
During this process, the question was: Is this project just symbolic or could it generate any momentum for systemic change? With this notion, I created a brochure for new, upcoming pregnant and parenting students as my seed of change. In that brochure, I outlined the university’s ostensible support system, such as the resources and facilities for students with caregiving responsibilities, which in reality are often inadequate or entirely absent. I presented the fictional yet desirable offerings in the brochure, which would act as a speculative tool to critique current universities’ practices.
This brochure, contrasting the ideal with the reality, was proposed to the university with the hope that this kind of initiative would be considered in the future, moving beyond symbolic gestures toward concrete and systemic change. Ultimately, this project seeks to foster a more inclusive and caring academic environment where student-parents can thrive and succeed.
