[Asis-l] Fwd: [tripleC] Special issue call: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism

[Michel Menou]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[tripleC] Special issue call: Academic Labour, Digital Media 
and Capitalism
Date: 	Tue, 06 Sep 2016 19:18:40 +0200
From: 	Christian Fuchs <christian.fuchs at triple-c.at>
To: 	Michel J. Menou <micheljmenou at gmail.com>



Dear tripleC Readers,

We want to make you aware of a new, open call for abstracts to a tripleC
special issue:

Call for Abstracts: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism
Special Issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique

http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/announcement/view/27

Guest Editors: Thomas Allmer and Ergin Bulut

Modern universities have always been part of and embedded into capitalism in
political, economic and cultural terms. In 1971, at the culmination of the
Vietnam War, the Chomsky-Foucault debate reminded us of this fact when a
young student pointed a question towards Chomsky: “How can you, with your
very courageous attitude towards the war in Vietnam, survive in an
institution like MIT, which is known here as one of the great war
contractors and intellectual makers of this war?” (Chomsky and Foucault
2006, 63) Chomsky responded dialectically, but also had to admit that the
academic institution he is working for is a major organisation of war
research and thereby strengthens the political contradictions and
inequalities in capitalist societies.

Edward P. Thompson, one of the central figures in the early years of British
cultural studies, edited the book “Warwick University Ltd” in 1970.
Thompson was working at the University of Warwick then and published
together with colleagues and students a manuscript that discovered, as the
title suggests, the close relationship of their university with industry and
industrial capitalism. The book also revealed some evidence of secret
political surveillance of staff and students by the university uncovered by
students occupying the Registry at Warwick at that time.

The relationship between state control and global capitalism has intensified
in the last decades. With the collapse of the welfare state and the drop of
public funds, universities are positioning themselves as active agents of
global capital, transforming urban spaces into venues for capital
accumulation and competing for international student populations for profit.
In this environment, students have to pay significant amounts of tuition for
precarious futures. Similarly, teaching and research faculties across the
globe have to negotiate their roles that are often strictly defined in an
entrepreneurial manner. Increasingly, the value of academic labour is
measured in capitalist terms and therefore subject to new forms of control,
surveillance and productivity measures. As the recent cases of Steven
Salaita (USA), Academics for Peace (Turkey) and the crackdown against
students in India reveal, academic labour and academics in general are also
facing immense challenges in terms of state control and freedom of speech.

Situated in this economic and political context, the overall task of this
special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is to gather
critical contributions examining universities, academic labour, digital
media and capitalism. We are thus particularly interested in articles
focusing on (1) the context, history and theoretical concepts underlying
academic labour, (2) the relationship between academic work and digital
media/new information and communication technologies/the Internet/social
media and (3) the political potentials and challenges within higher
education.

We welcome submissions that cover one or more of the following or related
questions.

1. Contextualising and Theorising Academic Labour

• What is the historical role of universities and academic labour and how
has it changed over time?
• What is the role of universities for capitalist development in the age
of neoliberalism and post-Fordism (e.g. employability, market-driven and
industrial research)?
• How far can the neoliberal university be considered as medium and
outcome of informational capitalism?
• How far can the university expansion be understood as a dialectic
development of progress and regress, social achievement and advanced
commodification?
• What is meant by concepts such as Warwick University Ltd, McUniversity,
academic proletarianisation, edu-factory, corporate university, academic
capitalism, entrepreneurial university, university gamble, digital diploma
mills, global university, DIY university, etc. in the context of academic
labour? How are these concepts related to the wider social context and the
existing capitalist order? How can a systematic typology of the existing
literature be constructed?
• What is the role of the concept of value for understanding academic
labour?
• What is the role of the concepts of the working class and the
proletariat for theorising academic labour?
• How should we define academic labour; who is included/excluded by this
understanding? Where does adjunct labour stand?
• What kind of workers are academics and how are they related to
knowledge, informational and cultural workers?
• How far can the outcomes of academic labour be considered as part of the
information and communication commons?
• To what extent rests informational capitalism on the commons produced at
universities?
• What are the important dimensions for constructing a typology of working
conditions within higher education (e.g. new managerialism, audit culture,
workload, job insecurity)?
• How do different working contexts and conditions in academia shape
feelings of autonomy, flexibility and reputation on the one hand and
precariousness, overwork and dissatisfaction on the other?

2. Academic Labour and Digital Media

• Given that the academic work process is today strongly mediated through
digital media, to what extent can academic workers be considered as digital
workers, and academic labour as digital labour?
• In how far can digital education and online distance learning be
understood as a new capital accumulation strategy that aims at attracting
international students in a commodified and competitive higher education
market?
• In how far can digital education be regarded as a response to neoliberal
conditions within higher education?
• How do digital media/new information and communication technologies/the
Internet/social media frame the working conditions of academics?
• How are the working conditions of academics characterised by
intensification and extensification in the realm of the digital university
(e.g. the blurring of working space and other spaces of human life, the
blurring of labour and free time, fast academia, always-on cultures,
deskilling, casualisation, electronic monitoring, digital surveillance,
social media use for self-promotion, new forms of intellectual property
rights)?

3. Politics, Struggles and Alternatives

• How do the broader political realities and potentials in terms of
solidarity, participation and democracy at universities look like?
• What is the relationship between the state and academic labour? What are
some of the lessons that we can learn from global crackdowns on academic
labour?
• What are the challenges in order to reclaim the university as site of
struggle for both academics and students?
• How far can the struggle at universities be connected to the global
struggle against capitalism?
• How do the political potentials of alternatives within higher education
look like (e.g. informal learning processes, co-operative education, open
education, open access, copyleft, creative and digital commons,
Wikiversity)?

Deadlines:

Abstract submission: 31 October 2016
All abstracts will be reviewed and decisions on acceptance/rejection will be
communicated to the authors by the end of November 2016.
Full paper submission: 15 April 2017

Please submit article title, author name(s), contact data and abstract of
200-400 words to: Thomas Allmer, thomas.allmer at uti.at and Ergin Bulut,
erginb at gmail.com

About the Guest Editors:

Thomas Allmer is Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Stirling,
Scotland, UK, and a member of the Unified Theory of Information Research
Group, Austria. His publications include Towards a Critical Theory of
Surveillance in Informational Capitalism (Peter Lang, 2012) and Critical
Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Commodification
(Routledge, 2015). For further information, please see: http://allmer.uti.at

Ergin Bulut is Assistant Professor of Media and Visual Arts in Istanbul. His
research interests include political economy of media, digital media and
politics, and media labor. Together with Michael A. Peters, he edited
Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor (Peter Lang, 2011). His
work has been published in TV & New Media, Critical Studies in Media
Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Media, Culture
and Society, and Journal of Communication Inquiry.
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tripleC : Communication, Capitalism & Critique | Open Access Journal for a
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