CM Vol 25 CfP University as Infrastructure. End of Play: Sept 15, 2025 | Culture Machine

Culture Machine Vol. 25 Call for Papers: University as Infrastructure 

Guest-edited by: Alexandra Anikina, Johannes Bruder, Megen de Bruin-Molé, Stephen Cornford, Kwame Phillips & Geoff Cox

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. 

One of the central references here is the second issue of Culture Machine, published 25 years ago, in which the editors examined the idea of the university as a culture machine (Gary Hall and Simon Wortham, eds. The University Culture Machine, 2000). At that time concerns were raised about the discourse of league tables, teaching quality assessments, learning outcomes, transferable skills, student-centred learning, problem-solving and working in teams, tendencies which have been accelerated and supplemented by new forms of managerialism. The university machine is now more fully automated and more obviously integrated into wider circuits of capital, the commodification of knowledge and extractive practices. To think about this infrastructurally helps to position the debate under contemporary conditions of ‘academic capitalism’ and its logistical operations that are some of the colonial legacies of institutionalising knowledge (see references below to Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, Miriyam Aouragh and Paula Chakravartty).

For some industries, the university has always been both a training ground for its workforce and research and innovation agendas, setting in place processes of subjectivation that best suit capital. In the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, such relationships have once again come under renewed scrutiny, with pressure from students to divest from and sever links with arms manufacturers. This follows a decade during which half of UK universities had committed to divest their direct investments in fossil fuels. These demands for transparent ethical engagement with industry directly contradict the university’s own priorities to be seen as a market leader in technological innovations that are often resourced and required by contractors from the defence, surveillance and big tech sectors. An infrastructural critique of the university is indispensable to contest colonial legacies, models of the institution and their damaging effects on social and environmental justice.

Marketisation, in turn, has also led to a pernicious rise in an employability agenda which arguably implies that the core value of higher education is in the higher earning capacity of its graduates. These economistic motives become internalised by students and institutions alike, leading to course closures of perceived ‘low-value’ degrees and staff redundancies to meet the perceived demand for vocational qualifications, induced also by the burden of student debt. Debt, as commentators (e.g. David Graeber, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Melinda Cooper) have pointed out, has become the defining characteristic of social interactions both offline and online, and has become consolidated at the level of infrastructure. The student and staff experience and ‘wellbeing’ have become determined by how easy and legible they are to capture, operationalise and represent statistically to the models of governance and management, further marginalising experiences that do not fit the corporate expectations or the real-life complexity of lived experience.

Vol 25 of Culture Machine aims to take stock of these infrastructural challenges to the collective creation of critical culture and theory. We argue that an understanding of the University from an infrastructural perspective helps to stress that the technologies it chooses to adopt follow a colonial and extractivist model with damaging effects on the wider environment and the well-being of people. What is required are viable alternatives — consisting of technologies but also knowledge practices and organisational cultures, with a commitment to care and justice in development and maintenance processes.