Student engagement in higher education has tended to be discussed in mainstream discourses by invoking typologies, seeking to place students into categories and focusing on the importance of "participation". I will give a critique of these ideologically loaded and normative constructs and their inherent contradictions, proposing an alternative framing drawing on sociomateriality. This framing, I will argue, allows us to explore the complexities of day-to-day practices, acknowledging the centrality of texts and meaning-making in "being a student". Referring to a longitudinal multimodal journaling study, I will argue that contemporary student engagement and sites of learning are constantly emergent, contingent and restless--not only transgressing the mainstream constructs mentioned above but also raising fundamental questions about apparently "common-sense" binaries such as digital/material, public/private and device/author. I will suggest implications in terms of research and understanding of the day-to-day unfolding of higher education as situated social practice.