Here’s a link to the podcast of an invited talk I did at the Society for Research Into Higher Education last week: Surviving life in the accelerated academy: prospects and problems for digital scholarship
In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the stress and anxiety of academic life. This developing discourse has an ambivalent relationship to digital technology: it has been facilitated by the uptake of blogging and micro-blogging amongst academics, yet social media and other digital technologies are involved in many of the facets of academic life that are seen as sources of stress and anxiety. This talk uses the notion of ‘social acceleration’ to address the changes taking place within higher education, as well as the role of digital technology in their emergence and the difficulties they create for academics. It considers the significance of digital scholarship within this context, arguing that its institutionalisation will profoundly shape the conditions under which people aspire to be academics and to do academic work. I make the case that there is an emancipatory possibility inherent in the uptake of digital scholarship by academics but that this risks being lost, as a narrower managerialist conception of digital scholarship begins to take root within higher education.
Mark Carrigan 