This work focuses on six voices – students and faculty from diverse backgrounds seek to investigate how our digital relationships, sustained across geographic distances and cultural differences, create spaces where critical pedagogy flourishes. This conceptual inquiry emerges from our experiences in an online master’s program in higher education pedagogy at a Swedish university. The research is rooted in critical questions arising during a course on ‘Widening Participation’ and evolved through collaborative learning spaces. Our work interrogates traditional power structures in higher education by challenging conventional student-teacher hierarchies. As an intersectional group – diverse in national origin, gender, race, discipline – we embody the tensions and possibilities within critical pedagogy (Freire, 1978; hooks, 1994). Our guiding research question asks: How does a digital learning community, which sustains relationality and creates space for diverse becomings, achieve sustainability through critical dialogue and shared agency? The study uses collaborative autoethnography (Hernandez et al., 2017), to generate bridging concepts from asynchronous online course discussion posts. Each co-author addresses these concepts in video diaries from their lives, which are then viewed and discussed synchronously via videoconferencing. The study has implications for sustainability practices in higher education, as it contributes to understanding widening participation from an asset-based standpoint that problematizes ‘inclusion’ as a destination, and it challenges the neoliberal emphasis on standardization and efficiency in digital education. It highlights how sustainability can resist massification and casualization by creating intimate learning spaces where everyone feels responsible to contribute (hooks, 1994). The authors aim to offer insights into sustainable online learning environments and social consciousness.
