Dr Janja Komljenovic and Javier Mármol Queraltó, Lancaster University
Chair, Dr Ben Williamson
This event took place on 16th June 2021.
Abstract
Universities worldwide are increasingly digitalising all of their
operations, with the current COVID-19 pandemic speeding up otherwise steady
developments. A large part is driven by proprietary digital products and
services developed and offered by for-profit companies that form the education
technology industry. This industry is part of the digital economy more broadly
that works in line with financial strategies of turning things into assets
instead of entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production. In this
talk, we will present some of the first insights deriving from the project
“Universities and Unicorns: building digital assets in the higher education
industry” aiming to investigate new forms of value construction in digital
higher education via rentiership. More specifically, we will focus on investors
in education technology, who are key actors in performing the future of digital
higher education. They are crucial not only for funding and consequently
materialising particular digital products and services but also for their
policy and discursive work. We will present how they discursively construct the
future of students, universities, higher education and its role in the global
digital economy.
Biography
Janja Komljenovic is a Lecturer of Higher Education at Lancaster
University. She is a Management Committee member of the Global Centre for
Higher Education (CGHE) and a co-Director of the Centre for Higher Education
Research and Evaluation (CHERE@LU). Her research focuses on the political
economy of higher education and higher education markets. Komljenovic is
especially interested in the relation between the digital economy and the
higher education sector; and in digitalisation, datafication and
platformization of universities. She leads the ESRC-funded research project
“Universities and Unicorns: building digital assets in the higher education
industry”, which investigates new forms of value construction in digital higher
education and employs a theoretical lens of rentiership and assetization.
Komljenovic is published internationally on higher education policy, markets
and education technology.
Javier Mármol Queraltó is a Doctoral Student in Linguistics,
Associate Lecturer and Summer Programmes Academic Coordinator in Lancaster
University. He co-convenes the Language, Ideology and Power (LIP) Research
Group in the Department of English Language and Linguistics. Javier’s research
interests include multimodal new media discourses, Critical Discourse Studies,
and English and Spanish Cognitive Linguistics. His research focuses on
multimodal political discourse and discourses of migration, adopting a
cognitive-linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS) to the
examination of online media. He contributes as Research Assistant conducting
critical discourse analysis in the ESRC-funded “Universities and Unicorns:
building digital assets in the higher education industry”.