There are seemingly endless calls for papers for journals these days. And most of them are pretty bland and boring. But not this one. Its great!

"University as Infrastructure" to be published in Culture Machine:
"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.
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The university machine is now more fully automated and more obviously integrated into wider circuits of capital, the commodification of knowledge and extractive practices. To think about this infrastructurally helps to position the debate under contemporary conditions of ‘academic capitalism’ and its logistical operations...
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We welcome submissions that interrogate the university’s integration into platform logistics and economies of datafication, on responsive/resistive methods, tactics and other approaches, contributions by people recently made precarious and/or redundant, and contributions that acknowledge critical traditions that take alternative understandings and practices of education to be a key site of social struggle" https://lnkd.in/eRH8dpgU.

Via Ben Williamson

About the Image

1 or 2 knowledge workers, running inside a wheel embedded within a computer mouse, struggles to keep pace as a powerful hand (representing employers or capitalistic forces). The image reveals that despite AI and digital adoption, rising productivity expectations often trap workers into producing more with less. Rather than easing labour, AI technologies risks raising the baseline demands, accelerating the pace of work under the illusion of progress. This image was selected as a winner in the Digital Dialogues Art Competition, which was run in partnership with the ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit) and supported by the UKRI ESRC.