Chapter 17: Digital Dislocation During Times of Universities in Managerial Crisis

The massification of universities globally brings with it an explosion of EdTech and digital architecture that manage learning and administrative operations in what are now highly complex and bureaucratic environments. Baked into these systems is managerialized digital structural violence which manifests in the way these systems are deployed, not necessarily the system itself. Using the metaphor of bones painfully dislocated from their corresponding joints, digital dislocation painfully separates and distances members of the university community from each other. These systems are deployed in the guise of “efficiency,” but instead create virtual barriers that act as panopticons to academic work, make administrative work inaccessible to academics which causes conflict, and tricks students into thinking they are consumers, not learners. These digital structures obscure human interactions between students, academics, and administrators. The problem is that these relationships lubricate the work of academics and administrators. More concerningly, students are dislocated from the academics charged with educating and facilitating their learning experiences. This digital dislocation is misaligned to the purpose and custodianship of universities as rightful places of knowledge creation and dissemination. This chapter is a call for action to university managers. It is within their power to introduce faceless digital ways of working which are homogenous and unresponsive to individualized needs and values, or not. Just as they hold power to develop ways of working within systems that result in digital structural violence, they also hold the power to choose alternative states that privilege the human connections that hold the university community together.