CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION As an educational ideal, the university institution has been one of society’s main providers of intellectual capacity and the place for thought. However, this space has throughout history morphed into several institutional spaces; from closed, elitist communities to fluid networks of availability, instantiated most recently in MOOCs. Therefore, attempts to demarcate the space of academia by different methodological standards, e.g. social, cultural, disciplinary or institutional, requires serious thought and proper articulation. As the transnational, collaboratory space of academia might destabilise the concreteness of place, the architectural facilitation of conversation, commitment and care, which provide the basic structure for academia, must be examined. To address the educational importance of the academic space, we must ask questions such as: What characterises the academic space? What are its boundaries? How is the academic space created through time? What is the project of the teacher, the student and the institution in which they gather? Which academic practices, strategies of learning and ideas of personhood should frame the space that occupies the learning institutions? Is there a common place for research and student life, for researchers and students? Is such a place crucial for realizing educational ideals? If it does not exist, how could such a place be created and what would it look like? In accounting for these considerations, we invite our participants to consider questions such as the construction of communities of thought and intellect, student activity at the university, the role of reflexivity, commitment and care in regard to learning, the place of theoretical disquisition and theory, and the position of the student, the teacher and the university.