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4. Imagining higher education as infrastructures of care

Chapter of: Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures(pp. 111–136)

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Metadata
Title4. Imagining higher education as infrastructures of care
ContributorLeslie Chan(author)
Mona Ghali (author)
Paul Prinsloo(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0363.04
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0363/chapters/10.11647/obp.0363.04
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightLeslie Chan, Mona Ghali, Paul Prinsloo
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2023-10-25
Long abstractThis chapter is both retrospective and prospective. The authors contend that universities are constitutive of extractive infrastructures in the context of increased reliance on corporate controlled digital platforms, and processes that render faculty and students data objects rather than active agents of education. Using pertinent and powerful examples, the argument is made that universities are framed by extractive infrastructures that encode logics of ownership, competition, individualism and commodification to reproduce inequalities. This framework is extended to pervasive data collection practices inherent in learning management platforms, performance measurement systems, university rankings, and other technologies that inform higher education discourses, policies and practices. This prompts imagining otherwise by conceiving universities as infrastructures of care. The authors offer a remaking of the “good” university by creating material, epistemic and affective structures that operate on principles and values of reciprocity, reparation, gifting, sovereignty, hospitality, and epistemic pluralism.
Page rangepp. 111–136
Print length26 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Leslie Chan

(author)
Associate Professor, Department of Global Development Studies and Director of the Knowledge Equity Lab at University of Toronto
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7779-2059
https://knowledgeequitylab.ca

Leslie Chan is associate professor in the Department of Global Development Studies and director of the Knowledge Equity Lab at the University of Toronto Scarborough (Canada). He studies the role and design of knowledge infrastructure and their impact on local and international development, and in particular the geopolitics of academic knowledge production and the uneven power relations embedded in this production.

Mona Ghali

(author)

Mona Ghali is an independent researcher based in Toronto (Canada). Her eclectic studies cut across disciplinary fields including global education policy, conflict and peace studies, international development, and feminist and critical theories. At present, she is interested in understanding how radical discourses are co-opted in mainstream politics, policies, and practices.

Paul Prinsloo

(author)
Research Professor, Open and Distance Learning, Department of Business Management, College of Economic and Management Sciences at University of South Africa
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1838-540X
https://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com

Paul Prinsloo is a research professor in Open and Distance Learning in the Department of Business Management, College of Economic and Management Sciences, University of South Africa (Unisa). His research interests include, inter alia, the ethics of (not) collecting and using student data. Paul was born curious and in trouble and, since then, nothing has changed. His Twitter and Mastodon aliases are @14prinsp.

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