‘Stuck at home’: digital and spatial inequalities and exclusions amongst marginalised students in Global South and North higher education contexts

This paper concerns digital inequalities experienced by higher education students across the Global South and North, during and following the Covid-19 pandemic. We understand digital inequalities or ‘divides’ as temporal, spatial, social, cultural, and material. The idea of ‘stuckness’ (Jefferson et al., 2019) frames this paper to examine how confinement disproportionally impacted marginalised students due to uneven study conditions, when forced into being ‘stuck’ at home. Drawing on an international literature review undertaken in 2022, we show how access to devices and connectivity, space and resources, together with pre-existing and intersecting inequalities widened and entrenched the digital divides within and across universities. These inequalities disproportionately impacted on marginalised students and increased their marginalisation, with considerably more negative effects for students in the Global South. We conclude by suggesting how policymakers and universities might adopt more creative ways to reduce ‘stuckness’, digital exclusions and marginalisations, particularly in the Global South.