Werezi Books

How surveillance perpetuates long-standing injustices woven into the fabric of higher education.

Higher education increasingly relies on digital surveillance in the United States. Administrators, consulting firms, and education technology vendors are celebrating digital tools as a means of ushering in the age of "smart universities." By digitally monitoring and managing campus life, institutions can supposedly run their services more efficiently, strengthen the quality of higher education, and better prepare students for future roles in the digital economy. Yet in practice, these initiatives often perpetuate austerity, structural racism, and privatization at public universities under the guise of solving higher education''s most intractable problems.

In Smart University, Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students'' abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, grant solicitations, news reports, tech industry marketing materials, and product demonstrations, Weinberg argues that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities.

Aimed at anyone concerned with the future of surveillance on higher education, Smart University empowers readers with the knowledge, tools, and frameworks for contesting and reimagining the role of digital technology on university campuses.

The ''smart university'' is a site of surveillance and austerity, and Weinberg''s book underscores that the so-called innovations promised by new technologies have both undermined learning and accelerated inequality. An important corrective to the narratives of ''digital transformation.''
—Audrey Watters, author of Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning

Smart University skillfully connects the history of universities to the range of technologies that exist to reinscribe and cement the discriminatory practices of these institutions. Its mix of timely examples and trenchant analysis provides a crucial account of the state of higher education, and importantly charts a path forward based in solidarity between students and professors.
—Chris Gilliard, Social Science Research Council

Smart University is a much-needed sociohistorical analysis of how data capture, surveillance, and austerity measures govern student life in higher education. From algorithmic recruitment and neoliberal wellness apps to the punitive digital tracking of Black student-athletes and invasive exam proctoring software, Weinberg brilliantly demonstrates that rather than enhancing learning, edtech and other digital tools often reify structural inequities. This book is a crucial addition to critical information studies, with far-reaching implications for questions of privacy, education policy, and computing platforms.
—Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

Weinberg brilliantly exposes the promise of the ''smart'' university as an alibi for the technological laundering of entrenched forms of bias, new forms of economic precarity, and, paradoxically, the dumbing down of higher education. Fortunately, the book also provides a blueprint for intelligently countering what passes for ''smartness'' in a tech-obsessed era. Combining detailed examples with insightful analysis, Smart University provides an invaluable resource for building a better future for both digital technology and higher education.
—Mark Andrejevic, coauthor of Facial Recognition

Get Smart University by at the best price and quality guaranteed only at Werezi Africa's largest book ecommerce store. The book was published by Johns Hopkins University Press and it has pages.