Laura Smithers

Anecdotal Life

Things I want to type about in the year ahead

In no particular order, and with no promises of coherence:

  • Anecdotes, real reality in higher education
  • Campus affects, in particular anxiety
    • Anxiety as an index of (our) relation to time, the future, connecting to anticipation studies
      • Future ready, the future is now!, future-proof…
    • Anxiety as the product of logics of preemption in higher education
      • Acting in the time before failure to ensure it never manifests
  • Decisions, decision-making, deciders
  • Productivity logics – their desires, relationships between productivity and preemption
    • Campus denizens’ attachments to productivity logics
      • Productivity, a morally empty action (doing something), as the source of moral action on campus
    • Datafication and productivity
    • Datafication, productivity, preemption, and
  • Revaluing higher education – breaking the common sense of data-driven decision making, or at least demonstrating data-driven decision making as a historically (and thus also sociotechnically) contingent common sense
    • Anecdotes, one of many ways forward
    • Does revaluing mean re-moralizing?