Higher Education and Technological Acceleration

This book critically examines the relationship between new media technologies, research ethics, and pedagogical strategies within the contemporary university. It debates whether recent transformations of higher education, rather than an effect of neo-liberalization, are actually an outflow of the technological acceleration of the university's own contradictory ideals around knowledge and democracy. The book sets up this argument by likening the university to a 'vision machine' which quest for total scientific and social transparency has recently caved in on itself, negatively affecting staff and student well-being. The book asserts that this situation reveals the essential tension at the heart of the university system, and explores the acceleration of this tension by analyzing a variety of teaching and research advances from Europe and Asia. Examining among other issues the call for creativity and critical thinking in the curriculum, the push for e-learning, and the advent of the digital humanities, this text offers a key analysis of the university's founding ideals and its constitutive relationship to technological acceleration.

Ingrid M. Hoofd is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research analyses the ways in which left-wing academics and activists mobilize 'speed-elitist' discourses in an attempt to overcome oppression. She is the author of 'Ambiguities of Activism: Alter-Globalism and the Imperatives of Speed' (2012).