[ecrea] CfP: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism

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) 
<mailto:(thomas.allmer /at/ uti.at)> and Ergin Bulut, (erginb /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(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 <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./

ABOUT THE JOURNAL:

tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a 
Global Sustainable Information Society, http://www.triple-c.at 
<http://www.triple-c.at/>

Editors: Christian Fuchs, University of Westminster, UK, and Marisol 
Sandoval, City University London, UK

/tripleC/ is a journal that focuses on critical studies of communication 
in and beyond capitalism. Articles in it should employ critical theories 
and/or empirical research inspired by critical theories and/or 
philosophy and ethics guided by critical thinking as well as relate the 
analysis to power structures and inequalities of capitalism, especially 
forms of stratification such as class, racist and other ideologies and 
capitalist patriarchy.


/tripleC/ is indexed in the databases Communication Source, Scopus and 
Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index.

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Chomsky, Noam and Michel Foucault. 2006. Human Nature: Justice vs. Power 
(1971): A Debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. In /The 
Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature/, edited by Noam Chomsky and 
Michel Foucault, 1-67. New York: New Press.

Thompson, Edward, ed. 1970. /Warwick University Ltd/. London: Penguin Books.
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