Abstract:

European higher education internationalisation has been reshaped by European University Alliances, which expand students’ access to joint curricula, blended mobility, virtual courses, collaborative projects. These formats aim to democratise international experience and foster transversal competences. Yet they also shift participation conditions: students must navigate multiple institutional contexts, administrative systems, and pedagogical norms at once. In this context, vulnerability cannot be treated only as a fixed attribute of predefined groups; it must also be understood through the concrete conditions of participation in alliance-level activities.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework of “new vulnerabilities” in university alliances, drawing on documentation and mixed-method evidence from eBelong2, a three-year Erasmus+ project on inclusive culture change and sustainable inclusion in the CIVIS alliance. The project involves five universities from Bucharest, Madrid, Aix-Marseille, Athens, and Tübingen. Its evidence base includes organisational culture assessments, focus groups, and workshops on teamwork and collaboration with academics and students across partner institutions.

Our point of departure is a rights-based understanding of vulnerability and educational inequality (UNESCO), where vulnerable students are those most exposed to discrimination and unequal outcomes, often in intersectional ways. Building on this, we examine how vulnerability in university alliances is also produced as relational exposure to participation conditions, including institutional rhythms, administrative procedures, and informal infrastructures of information and support.

Our research question:What situational forms of vulnerability do alliance-level participation conditions produce that are not fully captured by traditional vulnerable-group categories? Empirically, we draw on the eBelong2 project: mapping institutional capacities for inclusion; developing a shared framework; adapting instruments; collecting quantitative and qualitative data from students in vulnerable categories and students involved in CIVIS/Erasmus activities; and producing reports on inclusion, diversity, stress, motivation, and collaboration. Analysis proceeded through iterative comparison across documentation, survey patterns, focus-group accounts, and consortium reporting.

Findings suggest three conceptual shifts: from static to dynamic vulnerability; from individual deficit to relational exposure; and from access to belonging. On this basis, we identify four families of emergent vulnerabilities: intersectional vulnerabilities linked to cumulative constraints; informational and digital vulnerabilities related to unequal access to tacit knowledge, communication, and online participation; temporal and life-course vulnerabilities produced by misalignment between alliance calendars and students’ lives; and structural/institutional vulnerabilities linked to curricular rigidity, administrative opacity, and unequal institutional positioning within the alliance.

The paper offers a typology for inclusion design. Implications include reducing informational asymmetries, strengthening digital inclusion, improving timing and flexibility and supporting less resourced partners. Internationalisation through alliances expands opportunity, but also creates new exposures; to fulfil their equity promise, alliances must design inclusive participation conditions, not simply offer access.

Keywords:

European University Alliances, vulnerability, inclusion, belonging, higher education internationalisation, student participation, relational vulnerability.