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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Digital Content Delivery In Higher Education: Expanded Mechanisms For Subordinating The Professoriate And Academic Precariat, Wilhelm Peekhaus Jan 2014

Digital Content Delivery In Higher Education: Expanded Mechanisms For Subordinating The Professoriate And Academic Precariat, Wilhelm Peekhaus

Wilhelm Peekhaus

This paper suggests that the latest digital mechanisms for delivering higher education course content are yet another step in subordinating academic labor. The two main digital delivery mechanisms discussed in the paper are MOOCs and flexible option degrees. The paper advances the argument that, despite a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis other workers, academic cognitive laborers are caught up within and subject to some of the constraining and exploitative practices of capitalist accumulation processes. This capture within capitalist circuits of accumulation threatens to increase in velocity and scale through digital delivery mechanisms such as MOOCs and flexible option programs/degrees.


The Enclosure And Alienation Of Academic Publishing: Lessons For The Professoriate, Wilhelm Peekhaus Jan 2012

The Enclosure And Alienation Of Academic Publishing: Lessons For The Professoriate, Wilhelm Peekhaus

Wilhelm Peekhaus

This paper interrogates and situates theoretically from a Marxist perspective various aspects and tensions that inhere in the contemporary academic publishing environment. The focus of the article is on journal publishing. The paper examines both the expanding capitalist control of the academic publishing industry and some of the efforts being made by those seeking to resist and subvert the capitalist model of academic publishing. The paper employs the concepts of primitive accumulation and alienation as a theoretical register for apprehending contemporary erosions of the knowledge commons through the enclosure effects that follow in the wake of capitalist control of academic …