[Commlist] Call for Papers: Culture Machine Vol. 25 - University as Infrastructure

Call for Papers: Culture Machine Vol. 25
University as Infrastructure
Deadline: 15 September 2025

Culture Machine is happy to announce that Vol 25 (2026), University as 
Infrastructure, will be guest-edited by Alexandra Anikina, Johannes 
Bruder, Megen de Bruin-Molé, Stephen Cornford, Kwame Phillips & Geoff 
Cox. You can now read the full CfP at Culture Machine’s website 
(https://culturemachine.net/vol25-cfp-university-as-infrastructure/ 
<https://culturemachine.net/vol25-cfp-university-as-infrastructure/>).

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.

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).

Calendar

  *
    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


You can read the full CfP, with selected references, here: 
https://culturemachine.net/vol25-cfp-university-as-infrastructure/ 
<https://culturemachine.net/vol25-cfp-university-as-infrastructure/>. No 
payment from authors will be required.

All contributions, including title, abstract and short author bio (200 
words max) should be sent to CIIP inbox: (cciip /at/ proton.me) 
<mailto:(cciip /at/ proton.me)>.

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