Filipa Teixeira considers the notion of (mis)fitting within higher education and reflects on what is needed to craft spaces where diverse groups of researchers can “fit together well” while creating productive and lasting connections.
I stood in Platform 2 of Durham Station, waving goodbye to some of my new friends as they boarded their train and began the first leg of very long journeys back to the United States and South Africa. Grateful by comparison for my much shorter journey home, I was sad to see them go. We had quickly gotten close over the three days of the School, over workshops, meals and breathless walks up the Durham hills.
The Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School was hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, in collaboration with the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Linköping University, in Sweden. It took place in Durham in March 2025 and consisted of 3 days of workshops exploring queer methodologies and how methods like comics, autoethnography and zines can be employed in medical humanities research to promote the care of queer and marginalised groups.
I returned home from this experience brimming with inspiration, my notebook filled with questions for further research, concepts to explore in my thesis, recommendations of articles to read, and notes on how to incorporate zines into my teaching.
An Unexpected Fit
In the weeks following the School, both in conversations with friends and in the process of writing this piece, I have tried and struggled to articulate what made the School feel like such a safe, positive place, almost like a home. Time and time again I have found myself saying that we “just fitted together well”.
This feeling of fitting well could seem a bit paradoxical, as those of us who took part in the School came from different countries, institutions and disciplines, and researched a wide variety of topics. But we quickly connected over the fact that most of us felt like we didn’t quite belong, whether that be in academia, at our institutions, in our departments or even in shared office spaces. There were different reasons for this: personal characteristics, research topics, approaches to academia and, even, the way others within academic spaces interacted with or responded to us. Whatever the cause, the fact remained that most of us felt like misfits.
I am thinking here alongside Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a scholar focusing on disability studies and feminist theory, who uses ‘misfit’ as a critical concept to think about lived experiences of disability as tempo-locally situated (2011). This means that any given room is built and arranged in ways that create ‘fits’ for those who conform to the norm and ‘misfits’ for those who do not. But this can change: with time, by rearranging the room, or even by entering a completely different one.
For Garland-Thomson, the production of fits and misfits comes from a discrepancy between what is expected and what is. Or, to use her analogy, a misfit is akin to a square peg in a round hole (2011).
While the concept centres the experience of disability, Garland-Thomson argues that (mis)fitting is an inherent aspect of human experience, making it a useful tool for those of us who do not fit into the academy. Indeed, there is already some work analysing experiences of misfitting within higher education. “Queer Misfits: An interrogation of higher education design” explores queer experiences of misfitting in academia (Mauldin et al, 2025) and “Academic Misfits: Questioned Belongings in Higher Education” (Hoppe et al, 2025) shares various experiences of what being an academic misfit is like.
Academic ‘Misfits’
As a PhD student researching how rough sex is presented and discussed within British media through a sex positive lens, I am used to misfitting in most academic spaces. Within the first few weeks of my PhD, one academic pulled a face of disgust when I told him my research topic. Another walked backwards out of the room when my supervisor did the same. Both were lovely people whom I had personally worked with before enrolling in my doctoral programme but, for them, my research was unexpected and weird. It didn’t fit expectations of what a Politics researcher should study.
Students have had a similar reaction. When teaching an undergraduate module in 2023, I introduced myself, and my research, to the class during the first lecture. A week later, before one of the first seminars, I overheard a group of my students whispering about me outside the room “And then she said she researches that!”.
While these are only a handful of uncomfortable experiences, and I hold a lot of privilege as a white, heterosexual and able-bodied researcher, the fact that my research is considered “unusual” or “odd” means that I face specific challenges that make building community and belonging harder. I don’t walk into conferences, talks, workshops or, indeed, even this School expecting to fit. And neither did my fellow School attendants.
Yet by lunchtime on the first day, the ghosts of misfitting-past had been banished, and we fell into a comfortable, easy rhythm with one another. To just be in that space, together, without the burden of bracing for any negative reactions to our work or needing to carefully contextualise and explain it was truly magical. Like I said, we just fitted really well together.
Consciously Crafting Our Fit
Garland-Thomson recognises that fitting is a fragile thing and that while we might fit here, right now, this might not be true tomorrow. But I couldn’t help wondering what it was, specifically, that made us fit so well at the School. I’ve been grappling with this question since March, in the hope that mapping and tracing each element might allow a different cast of misfits to replicate the warm and productive environment of the School elsewhere.
In this effort, I have found myself returning to some of the readings we did in preparation for the School, specifically Ben Dalton’s analysis of Paul B. Preciado’s queer hospital and the potential to “hack” clinical physical spaces and environments to better serve the needs of queer and non-normative bodies (2024). Ben also led, with Chase Ledin, a workshop on DIY queer methodologies where we all collaborated on a zine which re-imagined and re-designed a queer hospital, by focusing on different wings, including the dormitory, the morgue and the operation theatre.
I have found a lot of synergy between this and the concept of misfitting, because this work is fundamentally about what Garland-Thomson called the need to “demand (…) better fits” (2011:600) or, to use Preciado’s language, hacking the round holes (2022).
Previous academic spaces created a disconnect or misfitting between us as researchers and the space. But I realised that the School was set up in a way that allowed us to mould the space to fit us, rather than the other way around.
Even before stepping foot in Durham, the organisers emailed us stressing that it was okay for us to look after ourselves while attending. They reassured us that it was fine to take breaks when needed, even if they were unscheduled. That we were allowed to spend time alone in the evenings to recharge.
Moulding the space to fit us better continued when we arrived at the School. In fact, one of the first things we did as a group was to collectively reflect and share with one another how we “wanted to be together in this space”, led by David Woodhead. We highlighted the need to feel safe disagreeing or challenging what someone else had said but doing so in a constructive and caring manner. Likewise, we discussed the necessity of remaining open and not being burdened by the idea that we had to perform the role of some mythical expert or academic. It was okay to ask questions, even if they seemed ‘silly’ or ‘stupid’, and taking time to wrap our heads around concepts was encouraged.
Throughout the three days we spent together at the School, we constantly strove for a better fit for everyone involved. This was sometimes about very small details, like opening windows or moving a session outside when it got too warm in the room, but it was also done in bigger ways like allowing people to respond to the material in whatever way felt right to them, valuing everyone’s perspective and different lived experiences, and remaining curious and open to others’ views.
The School helped me realise that fitting doesn’t always just happen; it requires thought, shared reflection and effort, mutual care and flexibility. Having the opportunity to attend the School and spend time with such wonderful fellow researchers also crystallised for me that while fitting in is not something the academy ‘gives’ to everyone, it is something that can be created and shared between people in any given space.
We must stop trying to fit into round holes. It’s time that we demand and create square ones.
About the author
Filipa Teixeira (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Her project, funded by AHRC through SWWDTP2, explores mediated portrayals of rough sex within British newspapers and magazines between 1990 and 2023 and interrogates how media constructs gender roles, pathology and agency.
About the 2025 Medical Humanities PhD School
This post is part of a collection of contributions from attendees of the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School which took place in Durham in March 2025. The PhD school was funded by Wellcome, as part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, and the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics (CMHB) at Linköping University.
All articles in this collection can be found on this page: 2025 Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School.
References
Dalton, Benjamin. 2024. “Paul B. Preciado’s Queer Hospital: Healthcare Architectures for Pleasure, Transformation and Subversion.” The Senses and Society 19 (3): 337–50. doi:10.1080/17458927.2024.2392954.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (2011): 591–609. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23016570.
Hoppe, Magnus, Siegert, Steffi, Temiz, Serdar, Hasselgren, Anton, and Seifan, Fatemeh. 2025. “Academic Misfits: Questioned Belongings in Higher Education”. Routledge.
Mauldin, Sage, Phan, Quan, Churchill, Lindsey, and Edwards, Kirsten. 2025.” Queer Misfits: An interrogation of higher education design”. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000677
Preciado, Paul B. 2022. “Dysphoria Mundi”. Grasset.
