[Air-L] CfP: Post-H(uman) index? Politics, metrics, and agency in the accelerated academy

[Mark Carrigan]

*Post-H(uman) index? Politics, metrics, and agency in the accelerated
academy*

*November 29th and 30th 2018*
*Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge*
*Organised by Jana Bacevic, Mark Carrigan and Filip Vostal *

The conference seeks to conceptualise change in contemporary knowledge
production in a way that transcends the dichotomy between theoretical
frameworks that emphasise the role of humans (e.g. pragmatism, cultural
sociology, critical realism, Bourdieusian sociology) and those that seek to
dissolve the human and/or focus on non-human actors (actor-network theory,
poststructuralism, STS, new materialism, transhumanism). Bringing together
scholars in social sciences and humanities whose work engages with
relationships between the human, post-human, metrics, and agency in the
‘neoliberal’ university, the conference addresses the methodological
implications of how we theorise human agency, the agency of technical
systems, and the relationships between them, in order to foster and support
critical scholarship and engagement the current (and future)
socio-political environment requires.

It is by now widely accepted that the transformation of the structures of
governance and funding of higher education and research – including
pressures to produce more and faster, and the associated proliferation of
instruments of measurement such as citation (‘H’) indexes and rankings –
pose serious challenges to the future of the academia. The critique of
these trends has mostly taken the form of calls to ‘slow down’, or
assertion of the intrinsic value/unquantifiable character of scholarship,
particularly in the social sciences and humanities. While these narratives
highlight important aspects of academics’ experience of neoliberal
restructuring, they often end up reproducing the inter- and
intra-disciplinary division between theoretical and interpretative
frameworks that foreground human agency (focusing on student movements,
working experiences of academics, or decision-making) and those that
foreground the performativity of non-human agents (focusing on the role of
metrics, indexes, analytics or institutions).

This intellectual fragmentation constrains attempts to study these
processes in genuinely interdisciplinary ways. On the rare occasions when
meaningful exchange does happen, conceptual, ideological, and institutional
fault lines hinder sustained dialogue, often leading to the reassertion of
old certainties in lieu of engagement with complex relational,
institutional, socio-technical, and political/policy realities of
transformation. The conference aims to provide an intellectual and
institutional framework that challenges this dichotomy, and seeks to
develop ways of thinking that are mutually reinforcing, rather than
exclusive. It focuses on the issue of the (post)human as the ontological
underpinning to the descriptive and explanatory work needed, as well as the
normative horizon for resistance.

It links with preceding events in Accelerated Academy, an international
interdisciplinary network assembled to develop new approaches to the
analysis of higher education around critical interrogation of the concept
of ‘acceleration’. The first event (Prague, December 2015) focused on
metricisation and power in the academy; the second, smaller symposium
(Warwick, September 2016), was dedicated to theories and experiences of
anxiety and work in relation to acceleration; the third (Leiden, December
2016) to the politics and sociology of evaluation in universities; the
fourth (Prague, May 2018) explored academic timescapes and the challenges
posed by their complexity; the fifth (Cambridge, June 2018) reflected on
the role of agency in the transformation of the academy.

This conference engages with and responds to the growing interest in
scholarship on trans- and post-humanism, and its impact on understanding
change in the context of knowledge production. It also has wider
theoretical significance, as the intellectual dichotomy of the human and
non-human is confronted in any attempt to understand socio-technical
changes unfolding in digital(ised) capitalism. In this sense, we aim to
address broader questions of social ontology and explanatory methodology
posed by the imbrication of the social and the technical, and, not less
importantly, the questions this raises for conceptualising agency and
resistance in the ‘accelerated’ academy.

*We invite contributions for 30 minute talks which speak to any of these
themes. If you would like to submit a proposal then please contact
mac228 at cam.ac.uk <mac228 at cam.ac.uk> with a 500 word abstract and short
biographical note by September 30th. There will be no charge to attend the
conference. *