This symposium paper calls for new approaches to understanding big data, and platform-based algorithmic governance in the higher education sector by problematizing the platform as a particular kind of evaluative infrastructure (Srnicek, 2017; Langley and Leyshon, 2017), particularly as it relates to the evaluation of HE as platform outside of social and political conflict. Taking comparing as a mode of explanation (Steinmetz, 2004) and not an outcome (the dominant use of comparison), this intervention sketches out the conceptual resources (Kornberger et al., 2017) for examining the ubiquity of platforms, and platform capitalism in shaping the political regulations and conflicts emerging in the lived practices of the academy. In doing so, it is seeking to turn the academy inside out, so that more traditional knowledge forms and productions can be transformed and valorised in the moral and values economy dominated by platform capitalism. This paper explores six knowledge purposes and processes, and show how comparing these platforms and their infrastructures enables us to trace: (i) shifts over time in different processes and forms of knowledge production, circulation and consumption, particularly in the UK and European contexts but also as they relate to HE in development sites such as Latin America; (ii) their political economies; (iii) forms of algorithmic governance; and (iv) the means through which new kinds of worth and value is created and accounted for, such as professional identity, notions of scholarship and the impact of national conflict and political turmoil. I conclude by arguing that such comparison can reveal the complex and diverse ways in which digital platforms create new relational possibilities, and open up new worlds, and make possible new identities, forms of expertise, and evaluative practices in higher education possible whilst closing off others. These latter ‘knowledge purposes’ are then assessed in relation to context specific HE sites that vary in terms of political conflict, rising nationalisms or forms of bordering and securitisation emerging from wider global political and economic issues.

Kornberger, M., Pflueger, D., and Mouritsen, J., (2017) Evaluative infrastructures: accounting for platform organisation, in Accounting, Organisations and Society, 60, pp. 79-95. Langley, P. and Leyshon, A., (2017) Platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation, Finance and society, 3 (1), pp. 11-31.. Srnicek, N., (2017) Platform Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Steinmetz, G., (2004) Odious comparisons: incommensurability, the case study and ‘small N’s’ in sociology, Sociological Theory, 22 (3), pp. 371-400.