Culture Machine Vol. 25 Call for Papers:

University as Infrastructure 

Guest-edited by:

Alexandra Anikina,

Johannes Bruder,

Megen de Bruin-Molé,

Stephen Cornford,

Kwame Phillips &

Geoff Cox

 

Universities have become increasingly dependent on a proliferation of outsourced services, database providers and information management systems, with spiraling costs across the sector as a whole. From virtual learning environments, digital attendance systems, human resources software, booking platforms, data repositories, and online teaching platforms to the basic provision of email and server space, much of the infrastructure of the contemporary marketised university is outsourced to big tech. The time of both students and staff is increasingly called upon to input, update, confirm, action, and feedback on information stored in outsourced databases, producing surplus value for external software providers, many of which are ultimately owned by private equity firms. The student and staff experience and ‘well-being’ – both vaunted as key priorities by all universities – have become determined by the functionality of these online systems and their ‘affective’ operations. 

One of the central references here is the second issue of Culture Machine, published 25 years ago, in which the editors examined the idea of the university as a culture machine (Gary Hall and Simon Wortham, eds. The University Culture Machine, 2000). At that time concerns were raised about the discourse of league tables, teaching quality assessments, learning outcomes, transferable skills, student-centred learning, problem-solving and working in teams, tendencies which have been accelerated and supplemented by new forms of managerialism. The university machine is now more fully automated and more obviously integrated into wider circuits of capital, the commodification of knowledge and extractive practices. To think about this infrastructurally helps to position the debate under contemporary conditions of ‘academic capitalism’ and its logistical operations that are some of the colonial legacies of institutionalising knowledge (see references below to Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, Miriyam Aouragh and Paula Chakravartty).

For some industries, the university has always been both a training ground for its workforce and research and innovation agendas, setting in place processes of subjectivation that best suit capital. In the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, such relationships have once again come under renewed scrutiny, with pressure from students to divest from and sever links with arms manufacturers. This follows a decade during which half of UK universities had committed to divest their direct investments in fossil fuels. These demands for transparent ethical engagement with industry directly contradict the university’s own priorities to be seen as a market leader in technological innovations that are often resourced and required by contractors from the defence, surveillance and big tech sectors. An infrastructural critique of the university is indispensable to contest colonial legacies, models of the institution and their damaging effects on social and environmental justice.

Marketisation, in turn, has also led to a pernicious rise in an employability agenda which arguably implies that the core value of higher education is in the higher earning capacity of its graduates. These economistic motives become internalised by students and institutions alike, leading to course closures of perceived ‘low-value’ degrees and staff redundancies to meet the perceived demand for vocational qualifications, induced also by the burden of student debt. Debt, as commentators (e.g. David Graeber, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Melinda Cooper) have pointed out, has become the defining characteristic of social interactions both offline and online, and has become consolidated at the level of infrastructure. The student and staff experience and ‘wellbeing’ have become determined by how easy and legible they are to capture, operationalise and represent statistically to the models of governance and management, further marginalising experiences that do not fit the corporate expectations or the real-life complexity of lived experience.

Vol 25 of Culture Machine aims to take stock of these infrastructural challenges to the collective creation of critical culture and theory. We argue that an understanding of the University from an infrastructural perspective helps to stress that the technologies it chooses to adopt follow a colonial and extractivist model with damaging effects on the wider environment and the well-being of people. What is required are viable alternatives — consisting of technologies but also knowledge practices and organisational cultures, with a commitment to care and justice in development and maintenance processes. We need to look outside the formal educational setting for examples of practices that are more open and collective, adaptive to conditions and allow for the development of infrastructures based on principles of commoning and care. What forms of infrastructure can be imagined in keeping with the free/open exchange of knowledge, sensitive to difference and the operations of power, infrastructures that support collective practices, social, environmental and epistemic justice?

Initiated by the Critical Infrastructures & Image Politics research group at Winchester School of Art in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University and Critical Media Lab, Basel Academy of Art and Design, this special issue aims to take stock of the challenges and possibilities here for University as Infrastructure. We welcome submissions that interrogate the university’s integration into platform logistics and economies of datafication, on responsive/resistive methods, tactics and other approaches, contributions by people recently made precarious and/or redundant, and contributions that acknowledge critical traditions that take alternative understandings and practices of education to be a key site of social struggle (invoking the radical pedagogy of Paolo Freire, Ivan Illich or bell hooks, and the autonomous politics of Copenhagen Free University or the Anti-University in London). 

 

The list of potential themes includes, but is not limited to:

the university’s shift from culture machine to infrastructure machine

the logistical operation of university corporatisation, marketisation and neoliberalisation of education

the dependency on outsourced online and automated services

recent developments in generative artificial intelligence and increased automation of knowledge systems

extractivism and the influence of the industrial-military complex within university

financial and governance models of universities

the ambiguous leveraging of freedom of speech & freedom of science by universities

universities’ responses to national regulations and political shifts

examining the changing roles, qualities and value of the student and staff experience 

the tension between the lived experience and ‘well-being’, ‘mental health’, ‘EDI’ as defined by university structures

affective/cognitive capital within university as infrastructure

critical perspectives of the university that draw upon queer & transfeminist, postcolonial and critical race studies

grassroots open and adaptive alternatives

student and staff infrastructural activism

care in the development and maintenance of infrastructures

historical reflection on education as a key site of social struggle

university responses to student occupations

submissions that are critical or subversive towards the format of academic papers (please contact the editors to check if the format can be supported in the existing infrastructure of Culture Machine)

 

Calendar

Open call launch – 6 July 2025

Abstract submissions (up to 300 words) are due on 15 September 2025 

Submit Drafts 15 December 2025

Peer Review 1 February – 31 May 2026

Revised Articles due on 1 August 2026

Publication in October 2026

 

All contributions, including title, abstract and short author bio (200 words max) should be sent to CIIP inbox cciip@proton.me.

 

Please follow the Author Guidelines for submissions!

 

Selected References

Aouragh, M. & Chakravartty, P. (2016) Infrastructures of Empire: Towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies. Media, Culture and Society 38 (4): 559-575.

Cooper, M. (2024) Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. London: Zone Books & Princeton University Press.

Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. (2024) Data Grab: The new Colonialism of Big Tech and how to fight back. WH Allen.

Ferreira da Silva, D. (2022) Unpayable Debt. Sternberg Press.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Continuum.

Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: The First 5000 Years. Melville House.

Harney, S. & Moten, F. (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions.

hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge.

Illich, I. (1972) Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.