Computing the Student: Co-developing a research agenda for higher education surveillance with students

Digital data surveillance of students in Higher Education (HE) is now ubiquitous and increasingly fine-grained, encompassing the ways that institutions monitor student attendance, location, visa compliance, ‘integrity’ of assessments, ‘engagement’, and ‘wellbeing’, amongst others (Ross, 2022; Beetham et al. 2022). Such a ‘surveillance culture’ (Lyon, 2017), in which students’ are primarily known and governed through their data profiles, potentially undermines the pedagogical relationships of trust and care in HE, which are essential to educational flourishing (Doyle 2021).
In this early-stage scoping project we collaborated with a group of HE students to co-develop a future research agenda for researching university digital monitoring and surveillance. Working with students from diverse disciplinary and international backgrounds, we sought to place students’ experiences, insights and concerns at the centre of the research process. Students held varied, complex and ambivalent orientations towards their own digital surveillance, neither entirely resistant to data monitoring nor espousing the resignation of “surveillance realism” (Dencik 2018). In this context, centring the everyday experiences of students to co-create a critical research agenda for HE data surveillance, raised a number of methodological and ethical considerations. These include:

- tensions between students’ sometimes optimistic data imaginaries and more ‘critical’ framings of data power;
- navigating students’ transitory engagement with Universities and future-facing orientations of data monitoring;
- the complexity of researching data flows between HE institutions and third parties;
- and ethical questions of privacy, consent and agency when investigating institutional knowledge and decision-making about individuals and cohorts.

We conclude by evaluating the methodological tensions, opportunities and ethical considerations involved in engaging diverse students in critical research about data power.