Project overview
Universities have become increasingly dependent on a proliferation of outsourced services, database providers and information management systems, with spiraling costs across the sector as a whole. From virtual learning environments, digital attendance systems, human resources software, booking platforms, data repositories, and online teaching platforms to the basic provision of email and server space, much of the infrastructure of the contemporary marketised university is outsourced to big tech. The time of both students and staff is increasingly called upon to input, update, confirm, action, and feedback on information stored in outsourced databases, producing surplus value for external software providers, many of which are ultimately owned by private equity firms. The student and staff experience and ‘well-being’ – both vaunted as key priorities by all universities – have become determined by the functionality of these online systems and their ‘affective’ operations.
This project aims to take stock of infrastructural challenges to the collective creation of critical culture and theory. We argue that an understanding of the University from an infrastructural perspective helps to stress that the technologies it chooses to adopt follow a colonial and extractivist model with damaging effects on the wider environment and the well-being of people. What is required are viable alternatives — consisting of technologies but also knowledge practices and organisational cultures, with a commitment to care and justice in development and maintenance processes. We need to look outside the formal educational setting for examples of practices that are more open and collective, adaptive to conditions and allow for the development of infrastructures based on principles of commoning and care. What forms of infrastructure can be imagined in keeping with the free/open exchange of knowledge, sensitive to difference and the operations of power, infrastructures that support collective practices, social, environmental and epistemic justice?
This project aims to take stock of infrastructural challenges to the collective creation of critical culture and theory. We argue that an understanding of the University from an infrastructural perspective helps to stress that the technologies it chooses to adopt follow a colonial and extractivist model with damaging effects on the wider environment and the well-being of people. What is required are viable alternatives — consisting of technologies but also knowledge practices and organisational cultures, with a commitment to care and justice in development and maintenance processes. We need to look outside the formal educational setting for examples of practices that are more open and collective, adaptive to conditions and allow for the development of infrastructures based on principles of commoning and care. What forms of infrastructure can be imagined in keeping with the free/open exchange of knowledge, sensitive to difference and the operations of power, infrastructures that support collective practices, social, environmental and epistemic justice?
