Surveillance in Higher Education

Summary

Surveillance capacities and practices in the higher education (HE) sector are expanding rapidly. Students and staff—academic and professional—are monitored using a range of technologies and for a variety of purposes. There are good reasons to explore how and why these practices are becoming increasingly normalized, and to challenge this normalization. There is a growing body of work relating to surveillance in HE, with distinctive pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic concerns relating to the switch to remote and hybrid work and study. New questions are also arising in relation to the development of generative artificial intelligence and its embrace as a technology to support learning, teaching, and research. Existing research into surveillance capacities and practices in HE emphasizes some of the different ways in which trust is being undermined. A new “disclosive archaeology” analyzes how surveillant technologies embed and enact particular discourses and thus create new tensions within and challenges for the sector. In particular, it highlights the risks that surveillant practices pose for academic cultures, including dangers of exacerbating inequalities, entrenching extractive data practices, and distorting the basis of collegial and cooperative knowledge generation that underpins both research and teaching.