Towards a critical and intersectional perspective in listening to suffering in neoliberal times: student experiences in French higher education

Abstract

This article presents the analysis of the first stage of a study carried out in France between 2023 and 2024. It addresses the experiences of university students in relation to the challenges of academic life in neoliberal times. The data analyzed comes from an online socio-anthropological questionnaire, with multiple-choice questions (on origin, gender, age, housing, material status, leisure, consumption of psychoactive substances, situations of discrimination, etc.) and a final, open-ended question. It was distributed in various French institutions and answered by 211 students from different courses and stages of their education. The majority of respondents were women from humanities courses. The cross-referencing of indicators in the analyses revealed that students who feel the greatest impact of suffering associated with situations of discrimination are also those who are in a more precarious economic situation; among racialized people, discrimination is greater when they have disabilities. In the open question, we organized the discussion into three themes: 1) suffering associated with experiences of discrimination or exclusion; 2) impacts of institutional structure and functioning; 3) addressing the research team. Relying on authors from philosophy and humanities, we linked excerpts from participants' testimonies to the issue of the medicalization of suffering, neoliberalism in education and its impact on the processes of subjectivation. We verified the relevance of the intersectional perspective in the critical analysis of the data, which suggests that it is decisive for improving public policies and institutional actions in a more inclusive direction.