This paper invites reflection on the terms of its title to suggest possibilities for educational renewal in a context of intensive financialisation and gamification.
I begin by foregrounding how contradictions materialised in the smartphone as enabler of ‘surveillance’/ ‘cloud’ capitalism (Zuboff 2019; Varoufakis 2023) are manifested in higher education through in-class proprietary extraction platforms such as SEAtS, Mentimeter, and TurnItIn. Next, I consider philosophical perspectives on smartphones and institutionalised education. The paper is critical of two tendencies: 1. to understate the contradictions materialised in the smartphone (e.g. Ferraris and Serres), 2. to remain at a macro-level theoretical consideration that understates educational practice (e.g. Foucault, Deleuze and Brown). I argue that these tendencies overlook what can be conceptualised as ‘mobile cells’. By this, I mean parts/cells of a body that can be epistemically privileged in terms of their capacity to shed light on the contradictory and mobile wholes of gamified/financialised education. I conclude that the smartphone is one such mobile cell today, the classroom another, and that the tensions between these mobile cells imply that another - more imaginative and collectivist - vision of education must be presupposed in plain sight by the full range of extractivist platforms.
Period
1 Jun 2024
Event title
Royal Society of Edinburgh Financialisation and Gamification Symposium
