She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Smart University at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.These forms of individualizing self-care that WellTrack encourages students to adopt stand in stark contrast to the self-care practices envisioned by Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde in the epilogue of A Burst of Light. Lorde situates self-care as a strategy of resistance against intersecting forces of oppression that shape the lives of marginalized people: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." In Lorde’s formulation, self-care cultivates a combative form of resilience in the face of social and political forces that seek to stifle one’s ability to survive. It is important to heed feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s warning about treating all forms of self-care as inherently neoliberal, which collapses the distinction between self-care practices indebted to the tradition of Black feminism with the forms of self-care that perpetuate dominant socioeconomic paradigms. WellTrack, however, promotes an understanding of self-care that is separated from an account of the social and economic forces contributing to mental illness, which disproportionately harm marginalized students. Rising levels of precarity under neoliberalism are what intensify insecurity, subsequently increasing efforts to anticipate and predict.Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age is about the proliferation of digital technology within universities, and its implications for economic and racial justice. While there is no universally agreed upon definition of a smart university, these initiatives generally include the use of data-intensive digital technologies to do some or all of the following: monitor and automate aspects of student learning, extracurricular participation, and progress to degree; manage facilities and resources; produce new revenue streams; support research activities that lead to external funding; and purportedly enhance campus security and student wellness.
Data Capture and Consent
WellTrack’s design for self-tracking, like most digitized commercial self-tracking apps, doubles as a form of capitalist dataveillance, meaning surveillance that uses technology to generate digital data that can be captured, monitored, and exploited for profit-seeking. While users of this app engage in self-care in that they record information about themselves in order to optimize and improve their mental health, the app also monitors and collects information about users for commercial gain.
If a reader were to open the book to page 99, they would encounter a discussion of WellTrack in Chapter 3 on “Wellness.” WellTrack is a mobile phone application modeled on cognitive behavioral techniques, which is used at a range of universities across North America for students to self-track symptoms of anxiety and depression. Page 99 gives the reader a decent sense of the book’s overall critical framing, in that I am critical throughout the book of ways that technologies are used to reframe structural issues in higher education as problems that can be “solved” through students’ individual behaviors and choices. In the case of Welltrack, instead of universities meaningfully redressing issues of inadequate in-person campus mental health resources, financial pressures as a result of skyrocketing tuition, or issues of institutional climate, students are encouraged to self-monitor using a for-profit software tool designed for data capture.
More broadly, the book is concerned with how digital tools that promise to solve some of higher education’s most intractable problems raise issues of student privacy, discrimination, and exploitation, and accept as a given policies that treat higher education as an individual investment rather than a public good. The book is equally concerned with the ways that corporate-backed technologies are becoming default infrastructure for teaching, learning, and researching within U.S. public universities, as well how administrators and campus police forces intensely monitor the lives of those who work and live there.
Finally, while the book details the ways that student recruitment, retention, security, and wellness are being restructured around the production of digital data in ways that undermine racial and economic justice, it also emphasizes concrete examples of resistance that hopefully inspire readers to take on active roles in the struggle against smart universities.
--Marshal Zeringue
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