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Higher education is already profoundly digitalised. Students, academics, and university administrators routinely use digital technologies, many of which rely on data, including artificial intelligence. Universities aim to operate as data-powered organisations to support institutional efficiency and the personalisation of learning and student experience. These developments are occurring against the backdrop of university digital infrastructure moving to the cloud and the increasing role of ‘Big Tech’ in the sector. However, there are many unknowns about the aggregate impact of digitalisation on the sector, and hence, questions about potential risks and harms remain unanswered. Our approach in this collective piece is to reflect on particularly relevant and impactful dynamics of higher education digitalisation. We first identify assetisation as an emergent mode of governance linked to the digitalisation of HE, which brings new temporal, relational, and lock-in challenges for universities and their constituents. Second, we examine the macro-level structural transformation of higher education with the increasing role of Big Tech and Big EdTech. We conclude by discussing the consequences of the identified macro power dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars in science and technology studies--and no doubt other fields--have increasingly drawn on Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics to theorize a variety of new "bio-concepts." While there might be some theoretical value in such exercises, many of these bio-concepts have simply replaced more rigorous--and therefore time-consuming--analytical work. This article provides a (sympathetic) critique of these various bio-concepts, especially as they are applied to the emerging "bio-economy." In so doing, the article seeks to show that the analysis of the bio-economy could be better framed as a political economy of nothing. This has several implications for science education, which are raised in the article.

Assets are made through the configuration of technoscientific and political-economic (or techno-economic) relations, claims and practices; a process increasingly conceptualized as 'assetization'. The UN's System of National Accounts (SNA) – a set of national accounting standards – defines assets as 'entities that must be owned by some unit, or units, and from which economic benefits are derived by their owner(s) by holding or using them over a period of time'. Accounting standards like the SNA are implicated in the construction of assets through their 'extension of the asset boundary', which happens periodically as accounting standards are revised and updated to better reflect changing business practices. Assetization, then, entails more than an analysis of the transformation of something into an asset, it can also be conceptualized as a mode of governance in which social actors change their world. To make this argument, I examine the SNA's treatment of knowledge, education and personal data: respectively, redefined as an asset (e.g. intellectual property product); treated as a quasi-asset (e.g. human capital); and subject to continued debate (e.g. digital data). In exploring the SNA's accounting standards, I show how assetization reconfigures the governance of knowledge, education and personal data, often in problematic ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]