Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-724

Title: The University and the Algorithmic Gaze
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Book URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/university-and-the-algorithmic-gaze-9781350281578/

Author(s): Lesley Gourlay

Reviewer: David Carrasco Coquillat

SUMMARY

Lesley Gourlay’s The University and the Algorithmic Gaze (2025) is a critical approach to the reality of university education and its increasing digitization, caused by a desire for transformation and quantification that is motivated by ideologies that have permeated different realms of public life, including the campus. In this sense, the book, which expands throughout six chapters, criticizes the overarching nature of an algorithmic gaze which acts upon people’s lives to influence how they think and act, but Gourlay does so for the specific case of the university, where she has been working for the last years and which she therefore knows and can properly scrutinize.

In the first chapter, the author criticizes the idea and discourse that universities as institutions are inherently flawed and in need of radical transformation for the world of the 21st century. She discusses transhumanism and the formulations of thinkers like Nick Bostrom (2005), who sees in the transhumanist dream of transforming the human’s own condition through technological enhancement the culmination of the Enlightenment project. Gourlay argues that transhumanist fantasies of a postdigital world in which humans are no longer constrained by physical land or territory have entered educational research and practice, and argues in favor of a more complex analysis of the relationship between the digital and the analog spheres.

Chapter 2 introduces the question of the algorithmic gaze in connection with the increasing surveillance brought by social media, which leads to a more deterritorialized data collection in detriment of users, who see their personal data being gathered at a distance. However, in addition to this data gaze analyzed by researchers like David Beer (2019), Gourlay argues that the algorithmic gaze implies a more agentive and constitutive dimension in which algorithms are venerated and play a major role in guiding people’s daily actions also at university, where, according to Gourlay, algorithms play a key role in administrative procedures, teaching, student learning practices and evaluation.

Then, in Chapter 3, the author presents the postphenomenological approach she uses to inquire into the algorithmic gaze. Therefore, she mentions a series of research approaches explored by van Mangen and Kuiken (2014), which include using personal experience and observation, and which she herself will make use of to criticize the pervasiveness of metrics like the h-index in the academic career.

Chapter 4 deals with the so-called audit gaze, which, according to the author, encourages an exercise of power over the university staff, students and potential researchers in academia, whereby these are turned into objects of information instead of subjects in communication. She provides anecdotes which show how the panopticon-like nature of devices like the h-index that measures authors’ productivity or the Research Excellence Framework that evaluates the quality of universities in the United Kingdom has changed how scholars approach their own work, as they are led to minimize risk and innovation in order to comply with the totalizing criteria that allow them to move forward in the academic hierarchy.

Later, Chapter 5 studies the relationships and entanglements that Gourlay believes are motivated by the algorithmic surveillance mechanisms of the university. She calls this phenomenon performative gaze, as she contends that these mechanisms are connected to the encouragement of certain ways of behaving and acting in academic contexts. The author links this performative gaze to the experience of the Covid-19 lockdown and its still ongoing effects in education. Particularly, she takes a look at how the turn to online meetings and conferences requires participants to act in very precise ways, being selective about what to show in the background of their rooms as the camera projects its gaze.

In Chapter 6, the last section of the book, Gourlay aims to draw conclusions from the analysis that she has hitherto presented. This can be studied as the defence of an ‘analog turn’ that debunks the hype that surrounds the adoption of proclaimed disruptive technologies in higher education. Her argument rests upon the recent experiences in the pandemic and the work by David Sax (2022), who claims that the forced digitization that the lockdown imposed proved the failure of the utopian ideal of the digital future. Gourlay claims that the pandemic highlighted the importance of the embodied and material aspects of learning, and vindicates the messy, contingent and imperfect day-to-day life that takes place in the university buildings.

EVALUATION

One of the main merits of this book is that the author presents a comprehensive overview of the reality of daily life at the university in present times, extensively describing what it means to be part of an institution in which productivity is very often encouraged over research quality, and which is increasingly driven by financial incentives that marginalize myriads of researchers and aspiring researchers who, due to diverse reasons like periods of maternity leave or lack of access to networks of influence, have seen their chances to progress in the academic hierarchy decrease or vanish. In addition, Gourlay does so in a way that is coherent with the argument of her work, as she makes use of personal anecdotes, observations and conversations with peers and students to stress how the importance of the university as a place to teach and carry out research transcends the quantitative nature of bibliometrics and university rankings. She condemns the alienating reality of learning analytics as a mechanism that allegedly supports students’ learning development, since in reality these technologies direct learners’ and researchers’ academic production toward competition with their peers and with themselves as individuals who must constantly progress within research metrics.

This monograph is particularly interesting for people who are aiming to dedicate their lives to research and teaching at the university, especially in Western societies. Although many of the examples provided by Gourlay come from the British context, where the financial incentives in academia might be higher than in other Western European countries, the influence of the Covid pandemic on the latest developments in the university and the appearance of surveillance technologies is a common experience in many different countries. Furthermore, the willingness of institutions to transform universities into spaces where the virtual experience gains a much more prominent role can well be seen as an evidence of what is happening today in many other realms of society, including areas like compulsory education. As the transhumanist dream of enhancing human traits via digital tools continues progressing, universities may appear as testing grounds to carry out those experiments, so readers without a professional or academic link to university will also likely enjoy the book and find in it useful insights into how the world may look like in the near future, and what can be done to prevent the most fatal consequences of this reality from happening.

The book engages with a tradition of thinkers that have tried to conceptualize the societal impacts of technological progress, including Jasanoff (2015) and Sax (2022), and takes part in the vindication of the analog experience at the university. The organization of the book is coherent and clear, in such a way that the position the author takes is explicit and easy to follow. Her interest in what she believes is unseen but valuable in the experience of contemporary university involves the four areas of embodiment, seclusion, ephemerality and co-presence, which she claims to be threatened by the policies taken in the context of the Covid pandemic and the following years. While some readers might have expected, owing to the title of the monograph, to find a large section devoted to generative AI, or at least some more lines addressing it, this has only a marginal position in the book. I believe this is due to the fact that, while the effects of ChatGPT and similar technologies are yet to be studied and properly analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, learning analytics, surveillance technologies and virtual meetings have already shaken the university experience in ways that can be measured and explored; and they can be looked at as past phenomena which, however, continue having an essential impact on today’s academic life.

All in all, Gourlay has written a very complete and engaging work about the growing presence of digital quantifying mechanisms at the university, a work which can in many aspects be extrapolated to the reality of social life elsewhere as mediated by devices of surveillance and self-surveillance. Furthermore, her personal anecdotes concerning bleak aspects of routine as a researcher, including not so positive peer feedback and disappointment about the position in author metrics, make this book an appealing reading where complex and rich theoretical concepts are presented to the reader through a unique individual perspective that connects the zeitgeist of a turbulent historical epoch like ours with the real, distinctive experiences of people who are living and, frequently, suffering the consequences of a system which prioritizes quantifiable measures. Her defence of traditional aspects of the university like the ephemerality of the lecture which is not recorded is an interesting argument that aligns with a recent tendency among social researchers (Sax, 2022; Smith, 2022) who share a critical view on the impact of digital technologies like social media over education. Readers interested in knowing more about this trend, in education and beyond, will surely enjoy reading Gourlay’s The University and the Algorithmic Gaze.

REFERENCES

Beer, D. (2019). The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception. SAGE Publications.

Bostrom, N. (2005). A history of transhumanist thought. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 14(1), 1-25.

Gourlay, L. (2025). The University and the Algorithmic Gaze. Bloomsbury Academic.

Jasanoff, S. (2015). Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity. In S. Jasanoff & S. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (pp. 1-33). University of Chicago Press.

Mangen, A., & Kuiken, D. (2014). Lost in an iPad: Narrative engagement on paper and tablet. Scientific Study of Literature, 4, 150-177.

Sax, D. (2022). The Future is Analog: How to Create a More Human World. PublicAffairs.

Smith, J. E. H. (2022). The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning. Princeton University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Carrasco Coquillat is a junior researcher with an M.A. in Language Science and Spanish Linguistics and an M.Ed. in English as a Foreign Language Teaching. His main research interests are sociolinguistics, geolinguistics and language contact. He is currently looking for a PhD position where he can continue his research work.