4. Imagining higher education as infrastructures of care

This chapter is both retrospective and prospective. The authors contend that universities are constitutive of extractive infrastructures in the context of increased reliance on corporate controlled digital platforms, and processes that render faculty and students data objects rather than active agents of education. Using pertinent and powerful examples, the argument is made that universities are framed by extractive infrastructures that encode logics of ownership, competition, individualism and commodification to reproduce inequalities. This framework is extended to pervasive data collection practices inherent in learning management platforms, performance measurement systems, university rankings, and other technologies that inform higher education discourses, policies and practices. This prompts imagining otherwise by conceiving universities as infrastructures of care. The authors offer a remaking of the “good” university by creating material, epistemic and affective structures that operate on principles and values of reciprocity, reparation, gifting, sovereignty, hospitality, and epistemic pluralism.