Infrastructuring educational genomics:Associations, architectures and apparatuses

Technoscientific transformations in molecular genomics have begun to influence knowledge production in education. Interdisciplinary scientific consortia are seeking to identify ‘genetic influences’ on ‘educationally relevant’ traits, behaviors, and outcomes. This article examines the emerging ‘knowledge infrastructure’ of educational genomics, attending to the assembly and choreography of organizational associations, epistemic architecture, and technoscientific apparatuses implicated in the generation of genomic understandings from masses of bioinformation. As an infrastructure of datafied knowledge production, educational genomics is embedded in data-centered epistemologies and practices which recast educational problems in terms of molecular genetic associations—insights about which are deemed discoverable from digital bioinformation and potentially open to genetically informed interventions in policy and practice. While scientists claim to be ‘opening the black box of the genome’ and its association with educational outcomes, we open the black box of educational genomics itself as a source of emerging scientific authority. Data-intensive educational genomics does not straightforwardly ‘discover’ the biological bases of educationally relevant behaviors and outcomes. Rather, this knowledge infrastructure is also an experimental ‘ontological infrastructure’ supporting particular ways of knowing, understanding, explaining, and intervening in education, and recasting the human subjects of education as being surveyable and predictable through the algorithmic processing of bioinformation

Mapping Mental Health and the UK University Sector: Networks, Markets, Data

The mental health and well-being of university staff and students in the UK are reported to have seriously deteriorated. Rather than taking this ‘mental health crisis’ at face value, we carry out network and discourse analyses to investigate the policy assemblages (comprising social actors, institutions, technologies, knowledges and discourses) through which the ‘crisis' is addressed. Our analysis shows how knowledges from positive psychology and behavioural economics, disciplinary techniques driven by metrics and data analytics, and growing markets in digital therapeutic technologies work as an ensemble. Together, they instrumentalise mental health, creating motivational ecologies that allow economic agendas to seep through to subjects who are encouraged to monitor and rehabilitate themselves. Mental health’ as a problem for UK universities has come to be largely defined through the outcomes of ‘resilience’ and ‘employability’ and is addressed through markets that enable training, monitoring, measuring and ‘nudging’ students and staff towards these outcomes

Surplus Citizens: Struggles in the Greek Crisis, 2010-2014

This thesis analyses the social struggles that occurred between 2010 and 2014 during the crisis in Greece: labour struggles, the movement of the squares, demonstrations and riots, neighbourhood assemblies, solidarity projects and economies, local environmental struggles, and anti-fascist and migrants' struggles. It discusses their internal and external limits in the historical specificity of the contemporary crisis and class relation. Drawing critically on Théorie Communiste's periodising schema, these struggles are framed, first, through a shift in the dynamic of the class relation effected by the crisis and the restructuring, which is a continuation of the first phase of 'neoliberal' restructuring in the 1990s. This shift intensified a central capitalist contradiction: while the capital relation imposes most violently the absolute dependence of subsistence on the wage, the wage relation fails to guarantee subsistence and integrates proletarians as surplus to capitalist reproduction. Second, the struggles are framed through the deep political crisis of state sovereignty and the relation between state and civil society, caused by the relentless imposition of the restructuring in conjunction with supranational institutions. These historical transformations are traced through the mutual constitution of international tendencies and the development of class struggle in Greece, against theories of dependency and underdevelopment. Ideological responses to the financial crisis and the logic of the restructuring are interrogated by employing theories of value, fetishism, and the state influenced by the German 'value-form' debate. Foucault-influenced conceptions of governmentality and sovereignty are also deployed to examine the restructuring's forms of imposition and the biopolitical crisis-management strategies of the state, which reinforced the racialised and gendered constitution of civil society. The thesis argues that these two elements, the changing dynamic of the class relation and the crisis of the state and civil society, defined the struggles of this period, in which two core characteristics can be identified. First, labour struggles confronted the dilemma between the necessity and inadequacy of the wage through an ambivalence between their attachment to work and their estrangement from it. This ambivalence did not question the terms of the dilemma posed, which were only questioned fleetingly in riots that interrupted the normality of commodity exchange. Second, the deep political crisis provoked struggles defending democracy, with the disempowered 'Greek citizen' as their central subject, which constitutively excluded migrants. The splitting of these struggles between leftwing anti-imperialist and rightwing anti-immigration nationalism, and into a struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, were not able to challenge this constitutive exclusion, which was only questioned by migrants' own struggles. Nationalism and the drive to reinforce unsettled social hierarchies played into the governmental effort to contain the political crisis, through the state's biopolitical management of the migrant and marginal, racialised and gendered surplus populations produced in the crisis

Mental health and wellbeing in universities in an age of digital capitalism

Student mental health and well-being is a focus of great attention and concern. While research is increasingly investigating institutional factors that might affect mental health and well-being, university infrastructures and frameworks themselves are rarely considered. This Short Communication takes the United Kingdom as an exemplary case to outline the implementation and intensified use of digital technologies, infrastructures, and data; and the expansion of new relationships between universities and other (often corporate) entities. We outline the need for greater scrutiny and deliberation concerning: (i) gaps in evidence and evaluation; (ii) uncertainty regarding how systematically students are being consulted; and (iii) broader implications of these new markets and data uses. These approaches are influencing conceptualisations of student mental health and well-being, and affecting which actors and which tools are measuring and intervening in students’ mental health. Many ethical, political and clinical issues are raised by such approaches: they deserve greater critical attention from all in mental health

Centre for Research in Digital Education annual report 2022

The annual report of the Centre for Research in Digital Education, based with the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh