You are invited to join this reception to hear more about the new book Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age, written by AUFF International Mobility Researcher Lindsay Weinberg, published with John Hopkins University Press.

During the book reception, Lindsay Weinberg will present the key ideas developed in the book.

About the book

Higher education increasingly relies on digital surveillance in the United States. Administrators, consulting firms, and education technology vendors are celebrating digital tools as a means of ushering in the age of "smart universities." By digitally monitoring and managing campus life, institutions can supposedly run their services more efficiently, strengthen the quality of higher education, and better prepare students for future roles in the digital economy. Yet in practice, these initiatives often perpetuate austerity, structural racism, and privatization at public universities under the guise of solving higher education's most intractable problems.

In Smart University, Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students' abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, grant solicitations, news reports, tech industry marketing materials, and product demonstrations, Weinberg argues that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities.

Aimed at anyone concerned with the future of surveillance on higher education, Smart University empowers readers with the knowledge, tools, and frameworks for contesting and reimagining the role of digital technology on university campuses.

Read more about the book in Marybeth Gasman’s review for Forbes here.

The book can be purchased at John Hopkins University Press here.

About the author of the book

Lindsay Weinberg is an AUFF International Mobility Visiting Researcher with DPU, a clinical associate professor in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University, and the Director of the Tech Justice Lab. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with an emphasis on the social and ethical implications of digital technology. She is interested in the constitutive role that history and unequal power relations play in shaping the design, application, and reception of technology. Her recent work has appeared in Lateral, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Her book, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (John Hopkins UP, 2024) examines the proliferation of digital tools for higher education governance, and their impacts on marginalized people within and beyond the university’s walls. She has been the recipient of internal and external grants to support research, seminars, and workshops concerning the justice-related implications of digital technology, including from the National Science Foundation, the Indiana Humanities, and the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence.

Registration

The event is open and free for all. Please sign up here.

Contact

Lindsay Weinberg, lweinber@purdue.edu