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Higher education dynamics in digital(ized) societies: Quality, research and networked collaboration

Tue, March 25, 4:30 to 5:45pm, Palmer House, Floor: 3rd Floor, The Indiana Room

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Conceptual Grounding

Key dynamics in higher education have been reformulated by the transition to digital(ized) societies. This parenthetical addition, more than merely serving as a postmodern nod, aims to de-naturalize the current state of affairs, which has only been accelerated by the forced digitization of university and social life since the COVID-19 pandemic and the actual and discursive widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). Nearly 40 years ago, Baudrillard (1987/2012) had conceptualized the current transition in the following terms: “The consumer society was lived under the sign of alienation; it was a society of the spectacle...We no longer partake in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication...a pornography of circuits and networks, of functions and objects in their legibility, availability, regulation, forced signification, capacity to perform, connection...” (pp. 26-27). As a result, the university and its pursuit for quality, learning, research and collaboration within an environment of global competition needs to be explored anew through a critical lens.

Higher Education studies have long engaged with the changing "status of knowledge" in "computerized societies" (Lyotard, 1984, p. 3). As a result, this panel starts from the assumption that universities and digital societies are co-constitutive, and therefore room exists for agency and change.

Digital technologies have introduced affordances and constraints to the everyday practices of higher education, but they also have introduced new logics of hyper-connectivity and immediacy. Research and researchers have been converted respectively into “content creation” and “content creators” not for the purpose of advancing knowledge, but rather for circulation and, even more recently, to train algorithms and large language models. Quality is reduced to self-verification rather than critical introspection and community deliberation. Cooperation among universities becomes a subaltern function to competition, despite their complementarity. In these complex and changing contexts, technology is, at the same time, a disruptor and a means for continuity amid disruption. For instance, AI destabilizes ideas of learning assessments and individual authorship, but also enables the continuity of communication in response to emergencies.


Format and Structure

If the subject of this panel resides in the co-constructive relation between universities and digital societies, then, its approach resembles what Abma and Stake (2014) name the "science of the particular" (p. 1150). Therefore, through detailed analysis of examples and concrete instances, in which core higher education dynamics take place, patterns of similarity and contrast will be identified. Concrete examples, interventions and arguments will be presented as threads in a tapestry open to critique and new contributions from the audience.

This panel explores the impact of core dynamics of higher education on digitized societies. These dynamics include competition and collaboration in learning and research for the pursuit of quality. Each of the papers explores one of these dynamics in a different national/regional context. These analyses share a series of epistemic commitments:

1. Technology as both enabler of continuity and disruptor,
2. Higher education (always/already) as a global endeavor,
3. Quality as a set of practices and assumptions about the university,
4. Competition and collaboration as complementary dynamics.

The specific papers in this panel explore (a) the impact of technology on student mobility, (b) the changes in accreditation and other quality assurance practices that post-COVID technology use has introduced in post-Soviet contexts, (c) the challenges that survey-based global research projects encounter for data collection in North America, (d) the possibilities for collaboration that inter-national, inter-institutional consortia in Latin America, and (e) how Ukranian universities and scholars create community and connection through technology. Collectively, the panel will offer opportunities for comparison across regions and topics and identify key elements related to the impacts of technology on higher education. The panel explores the possibilities for agency that emerge amid the cracks and ruptures of the system of universal connectivity that digital societies and universities have co-constructed and the possibilities for transformation within.

Contribution and Connection to the Conference Theme

Through critical, systematic analysis of particular instances and higher education contexts, the panelists identify brief spaces of possibility for the emergence of agency and change within a totalizing system of network proliferation. While universities and other higher education institutions (HEIs) are bound by the digital societies that surround and sustain them, the idea of digital society cannot be monolithic. On the contrary, the digital society is being constantly re-shaped by many factors, including academic thought developed in HEIs. As a result, this panel serves as an exercise of self-conscious analysis of the activities of those who are "in the teaching machine" (Spivak, 1993) and aspire to transform the university from within.

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