My work coheres within one or more of the four areas below:
Datafication. This is my mainstay lane of research in various expressions (productivity, preemption, quality, quantification, student success, and the monetization/capitalization of these) for the last decade. To what effect do modern campuses (governance systems, policies, responsible and moral actors, logics, et al.) act on students and other campus denizens as aggregates of recombinable and optimizable units?
Experimentations. In what times and spaces in campus life does datafication not hold? How might we imagine and enact the afterlife of datafication? In part I turn to theories of affect here — what do actors feel when future failure is manifest, in what ways do actors move outside of the capture of data, and so on. These times and spaces that exceed datafication give a sense of what practices might take hold if a different set of values, other than the optimization and/or preemption of data points, governed higher education. These articles experiment with re/valuations of higher education in their research process and/or in their presentation of findings.
Research methodology. In these works, I explore modes of research that allow for critical exploration of datafication on campus and how we might make higher education worlds otherwise.
Authoritarianism. Projects of datafication desire authoritarian modes of governance. These modes of governance reinforce and also transcend data – authoritarian logic also portends valuing higher education through how it can uphold particular leaders and ruling parties, not simply through how it can produce particular data points (including the data point of money). This lane of research explores the modes of organizing social life and social change that datafication and allied forces produce on and around campus.
Laura Smithers 