This paper draws on a Leverhulme Trust 3-year Major Research Fellowship, and will focus on the rapidly increasing role of algorithms in higher education, drawing on recent work in this area of digital sociology alongside related work in Science and Technology Studies. It will consider questions of agency, voice and semiosis in the context of ‘algorithmic cultures’, focusing on digitisation in higher education to consider the co-constitutive relationships between these technologies, knowledge practices and human / nonhuman subjectivities in the contexts of learning analytics, but also more broadly in digitally-mediated techniques of audit and surveillance, such as the REF and TEF in the UK, and comparable regimes of academic audit in Europe. It will conclude that contemporary higher education is saturated with partially acknowledged ‘algocracies’. It will go on to make a case for algorithmic cultures being considered as part of a theoretically-expanded notion of the ‘audit gaze’ in higher education, discussing this in terms of both the more obviously digital regimes of audit and surveillance such as learning analytics in the context of an LMS, but will also examine the less transparent roles of algorithms and digitisation in the day to day life of higher education, from admissions policies, widening participation, equity, diversity and inclusion, and the ‘unbundling’ of higher education, publication practices, textual access, through to the use of cameras, face recognition technologies, wearables, electronic gate technologies and regimes of surveillance in terms of student movement, attendance and conduct. It will connect these to theoretical work in surveillance studies, arguing that the university as a whole is subject to the audit gaze of algorithmic cultures. The paper will then move the focus to the more micro-level of the individual human subject, exploring how the digital - in particular processes of documentation - not only record information concerning students and academic staff, but also generate a co-constitutive set of relations and entanglements which have ontological and material consequences. Drawing on notions of material-documentation from Information Sciences, it considers the performative and disciplining effects of the collection, recording and use of a range of types of personal data in the university, from student demographic and social information, to the ‘traces’ generated by learning analytics. It presents a critical analysis which argues that these digitised practices raise serious ethical problems about individual rights, privacy and contemporary surveillance in the increasingly neoliberal sector across Europe. I will then shift the focus back to the day-to-day activities and practices to students and academic staff in the university, focusing on the semiotic, textual and knowledge practices which tend not to be recordable or amendable to surveillance, such as silence, reading, nondigital writing and face-to-face encounters, particularly those outside the official, accounted-for and surveilled time of ‘the curriculum’. I will argue that these activities, which lie outside of what is documented, lie at the heart of what a university is for, both in the past and in the present, in terms of epistemic practices, affect and relationality. I relate this analysis to practices of physical surveillance in the material campus, and digital surveillance such as facial recognition software, arguing that these practices simultaneously reveal and also hide aspects of practice which are subtle, normally unobserved, but central to the work of the university. Implications for this analysis in relation to learning analytics across Europe will be discussed with relation to recent international research and development projects, surveillance and ethics in the European (and global) datafied sector. It will conclude with a discussion of the role of learning analytics and datafication in post-pandemic recovery and innovation. This research is funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

This interdisciplinary paper takes a critical look at the ways in which digital data, algorithms and their effects are changing the face of higher education in multiple ways, both at the macro scale of universities and systems worldwide, but also at the more subtle level of effects on academics and students. In doing so, it focuses on the day-to-day life of the university, examining how the digital is changing the way that we communicate, learn, and create new knowledge. The role of ‘big data’ and learning analytics is analysed, drawing on a cutting-edge set of critical approaches. However, the paper also focuses on areas of academic life not normally considered to be part of datafication, such as the physical structures of surveillance on campus, and the ways in which systems of ‘quality’ in research and teaching can morph into regimes of surveillance and algorithmic discipline, with far-reaching effects on marginalised groups, academic subjectivities, textual practices, and what counts as legitimate knowledge. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, it interweaves insights from contemporary Applied Linguistics with posthuman perspectives on semiotics and textual practices, New Materialism, Science and Technology Studies, Information Science, and Human Geography. Its wide-ranging analysis generates fresh, critical new insights into the nature of communication, semiosis, textual practices, subjectivities and knowledge practices at this dynamic and fast-moving juncture in the history and development of higher education, providing a much-needed critical commentary, and set of provocative agendas for anyone interested in the university in the ‘algorithmic age’.

This paper will present a critical and theorised analysis based on an interdisciplinary consideration of the current state of play in learning analytics across Europe, arguing that pre-pandemic practices and aims need to be re-examined as we emerge into a post-pandemic phase. In particular, it will challenge the prevalent ‘discourses of inevitability’ surrounding the datafication of higher education, proposing that issues of ethics, surveillance and performativity are more important than ever. Questions surrounding the nature of student engagement, the effects of screen practices, resultant effects on student and academic subjectivities, and impacts on knowledge practices will be discussed. The actual and potential ramifications of documentation of the student in the context of platform capitalism will be explored, with the notion of ‘student as resource’ considered. It will also broaden the discussion to look at international contexts, across Europe and also in the Global South, and the ways in which the processes of ‘unbundling’ of higher education of commercial providers might play out on a macro scale, with a range of effects on institutions, systems, communities, marginalised groups, and individuals. In doing so, it will consider the risks that this might entail, and will suggest ways in which resistance might be expressed via critical research and policy. It will conclude with a proposed set of alternative futures which might upturn the assumptions of mainstream discourses surrounding the digital university in a post-algorithmic age.

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