I am indebted to the following sources for shaping my thinking for this talk. They are divided into sections on Care and Surveillance, but it’s clear, as in the talk, that the discourse of these two spaces overlaps.
On Care
My approach to supporting faculty to support students through the pandemic has been influenced by Maha Bali’s “Centering a Critical Curriculum of Care During/Beyond Crises,” especially her focus on (both in theorizing and in modelling) emotional presence.
Early in the pandemic, Hannah MacGregor wrote a piece about the exploitation of care for Hook & Eye, which I thought about a lot and then responded to drawing from a blog I wrote in the early and exhausted days of the pivot. My thinking on care took shape there.
I’m grateful to the way Inna Michaeli thinks through the neoliberal co-option of care in “Self-Care: An Act of Political Welfare or a Neoliberal Trap?” Care, and particularly self-care, becomes de-radicalized and individuated so easily. This thinking really emerges from Black feminist and Womanist thinking about self-care is a radical — but also a community building — act. Audre Lorde builds out this thinking in the epilogue of 1988’s A Burst of Light, and Angela Davis talks about it at the end of this 2014 talk. I learned a lot from Chris Sheehy and Suriya Nayak’s work on Black feminist methods of activism, also.
I quote in the talk from “Who Does the ‘Housework of the University’ During a Pandemic? The Impact of Covid-19 on Precarious Women Working in Universities.” It is worth your time to read. I find the language “housework of the university” extremely evocative (and useful).
Jesse Stommel’s “Designing for Care: Inclusive Pedagogies for Online Learning” gives an excellent overview of establishing belongingness.
On Surveillance
Autumm Cains and Sundi Richard discussed the “weaponization of care” at OER20, which helps to explain how things like Microsoft Habits — which are really surveillances — get sold as opportunities to enact care.
Chris Gilliard’s thinking about consent in “Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms” is formative for me, especially around the necessity of making how these tools work visible to students (and colleagues).
Shea Swauger’s article, “Our Bodies Encoded: Algorithmic Test Proctoring in Higher Education” — and the ensuing kerfuffle with Proctorio — crystallized (radicalized?) my thinking about surveilling students.
I love the phrase “Cop Shit” to describe the tendency towards exerting control in the classroom. I first read the term in Jeffery Moro’s piece, “Against Cop Shit.” Ultimately, I see this anti-surveillance work as part of a larger abolitionist project.
Cory Doctorow’s concept of the “Shitty Tech Adoption Curve” and Audrey Watters’ history of surveilling teachers are both helpful in imagining how what we deploy against students will also (is already) deployed against staff and faculty.
Akash Satheesan’s work on racial bias in the facial recognition tool used by Proctorio, and other work testing e-proctoring tools, is a critical addition to discourse in this field.