Keynote at CELT18 @DonnaLanclos and www.donnalanclos.com Donna Lanclos is an anthropologist working with ethnographic methods and analysis to inform and change policy in higher education, in particular in and around libraries, learning spaces, and active learning pedagogies and practices. She has conducted fieldwork investigating academic practices in the UK, Ireland, and the US, as part of a team and also as a solo researcher. She regularly presents workshops and talks on issues of digital practices and institutional change. Donna's keynote was titled 'What do we mean by Active Learning? '. Donna began from her experiences within an organization concerned with setting up the physical environments and then supporting active learning practices on a large university campus. Inherent in institutional turns to “active learning” are questions about pedagogy, space, and the ways in which universities do (or do not) create places for teaching faculty and students to reflect on and implement new practices, not just reproduce the old ones in new spaces. Donna draws on her work in libraries and elsewhere in HE and FE to ask questions about teaching, learning, place and practice, and what it all might mean for educational institutions in a time of financial scarcity and political precarity.