Written by:
Helen Beetham, University of Wolverhampton
Amy Collier, Middlebury College
Laura Czerniewicz, University of Cape Town
Brian Lamb, Thompson Rivers University
Yuwei Lin, University of Roehampton
Jen Ross, University of Edinburgh
Anne-Marie Scott, Athabasca University
Anna Wilson, University of Stirling

Abstract: This paper describes and critiques how surveillance is situated and evolving in higher education settings, with a focus on the surveillance of teaching and learning. It argues that intensifying practices of datafication and monitoring in universities echo those in broader society, and that the Covid-19 global pandemic has both exacerbated these practices and made them more visible. Surveillance brings risks to learning relationships, academic and work practices, as well as reinforcing economic models of extraction and inequalities in education and society. Responses to surveillance practices include resistance, advocacy, education, regulation and investment, and a number of these responses are examined here. Drawing on scholarship and practice, the paper provides an in-depth overview of this topic for people in university settings including those in leadership positions, learning technology roles, educators and students. The authors are part of an international network of researchers, educators and university leaders who are working together to develop new approaches to surveillance futures for higher education: https://aftersurveillance.net/. Authors are based in Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, and this paper reflects those specific contexts.

Keywords: Privacy, surveillance, rights, datafication, higher education, equity

Written by: Caroline Stockman and Emma Nottingham, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK.

Abstract: Digital surveillance in schools has been legitimised by the two-fold reasoning that it will optimise learning (the educational imperative) and increase safety in the school context (the safeguarding imperative). Yet a new layer of commercial surveillance has been introduced, through the third-party provision of educational technology governed by surveillance capitalism. Despite privacy concerns and routine breaches and misuse of children’s data, certain platforms have come to dominate the educational infrastructures at a massive scale. The protective legal frameworks such as the GDPR are somewhat disconnected from the social reality of schooling, and the discourse of ‘privacy’ is insufficient to understand the real existential harm. The following analysis seeks to highlight that the dynamics of surveillance capitalism in schools is an ethical threat to sustainable education, and a young person’s healthy sense of self. The analysis draws on David Lyon’s work on electronic surveillance, in particular the notion of ‘personhood’ to delineate where the existential harm occurs if surveillance capitalism continues to be an accepted model for EdTech in schools. While education is the threatened space, it can also provide a viable way forward in a digital literacy curriculum which has true criticality, agency and empowerment at heart.

Keywords: surveillance; digital surveillance; surveillance capitalism; platforms; data protection