Putting the university to work: technology-mediated extraction of land and labour from UK universities
- Mariya Ivancheva, University of Liverpool
- Brian Garvey, University of Strathclyde
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The return of academic workers from the UK’s most prolonged industrial action in higher education coincided with the onset of a global pandemic. The emergency push to online provision to maintain educational production, retain and attract future students, increased the visibility and frequency of commercial partnerships with digital education providers. Reviewing its origins in the neoliberal restructuring of UK higher education, this paper demonstrates how technologically-induced transformation to academic knowledge production has increasingly subsumed the functionality of the university towards market-oriented profiteering, while producing new divisions of labour. With a focus on the teaching and student facing roles that are increasingly undertaken by casualised, outsourced and deprofessionalised staff, the paper explores how digital technologies- radically dissolving of work/home boundaries amidst pandemic- facilitate further value capture from academic workers with profound implications for the organisation and experience of HE work and challenges to collective resistance to real subsumption of academic labour.
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Mariya Ivancheva is a sociologist and anthropologist of higher education and labour and a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. Her academic work and research-driven advocacy focus on the casualization and digitalization of academic labour, the re/production of intersectional inequalities at universities and labour markets, and the role of academic communities in processes of social change, especially transitions to/from socialism. She has carried out research in Europe, Southern Africa and Latin America, and is currently a PI on an SSRC funded project Redefining Essential Work, with focus on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on university-educated Venezuelan migrants in Argentina’s gig economy.
Brian Garvey is a Lecturer at the Department of Work, Employment and Organisation at University of Strathclyde. He teaches and undertakes research in labour and land commodification for primary production linked to the carbon and ‘green’ economies, with a particular focus on deepening inequalities within and between Latin American and Europe. He is currently Principal Investigator for the ESRC Global Challenges Research Funded project, “So who IS building sustainable development?” and co-founder of the Centre for the Political Economy of Labour with partners in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe.