An event co-hosted by SSESW’s Education Research Group and iRISE. This event brings together two researchers of Higher Education to share their current concerns relating to the persistent problematic of the inequalities, discrimination and delegitimation in the academy. Reflecting on the insights that have emerged in their work, Dr Jason Arday (Durham University) and Dr Grace Ese-Osa Idahosa (University of Johannesburg) discuss the costs, affordances and agency of academics within the racialised, gendered and classed conditions of UK and South African higher education. It is anticipated that the different contexts of their research, the UK and South African higher education, will provide interesting comparisons and differences in their recommendations of the agential and structural opportunities and mechanisms which can be created to work against such conditions.