‘Your U-Well-Being Journal is due today’: on some possible intersections between surveillance and student wellbeing in the future university

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper uses Participatory Speculative Fiction to explore the convergence of two important dynamics that are currently at play within the Higher Education sectors in the UK, North America and elsewhere: digital surveillance capacities and student wellbeing. We use short stories that were contributed and published anonymously through the Telling Data Stories website to show how their authors spontaneously connected surveillance capacities and potentials with contemporary concerns about student wellbeing. In the fictions they created, our contributors imagine how current and proximal future technologies might be enrolled in increasingly intrusive and interventionist neuro-psycho-bio-surveillance employed at all stages of the student journey. The stories problematise the relationship between visibility and wellbeing, expose complex assemblages of people, technologies and discourses and suggest possible outcomes ranging from embrace and perhaps enculturation to subversion and even inversion of power. We suggest that these possible futures are important signals of the need for wise decisions in the present.