Scholarship in societies of control: understanding and resisting the ‘data university’
28 June, 1:00–2:00pm, DCB1107

Everyone is welcome to this reading and discussion group. Please read.

We are reading: The Analogue University (2017) ‘Control, resistance and the “data university”: towards a third-wave critique’, AntipodeFoundation.org, 31 March, https://antipodefoundation.org/2017/03/31/control-resistance-and-the-data-university/.

‘[…] In this short intervention, we want to explore the possibilities for a third wave of critique related to the changing nature of academia. More specifically, we argue that we are now witnessing the emergence of the “Data University” where the initial emphasis on the primacy of data collection for auditing and measuring academic work has shifted to data coding itself as the new exchange value at work and productive of new subjectivities and freedoms. This third wave critique requires drawing a schematic line that now takes us beyond the intensification of neo-liberalisation, the internalisation of market values and associated affective structures of feeling to understanding our new digital and big data world. Influenced by Deleuze’s (1992) work on new societies of control, we argue that the genesis of the “Data University” lies in our active desire for data and its potential to mediate human relations and modulate our freedoms. This is absolutely central to our schematic for a third wave of critique: compared to older disciplinary societies like the school or prison institution (see below), today individuals both desire and are controlled through the active generation of proliferating data streams. […]’