Reconfiguring surveillance futures for higher education using speculative data stories

Surveillance in many higher education settings has become increasingly pervasive and fine-grained. Concerns are growing about negative impacts on learning relationships, exploitative commercial uses of collected student data, discriminatory practices, and even political, social, or physical harm inflicted because of surveillance and monitoring. At the same time, complex surveillance cultures in higher education make it difficult to disentangle personal and collective responsibility, understand the gap between intentions and impacts, or navigate the risks that can come with addressing these matters. In 2020, the Data Stories research project used speculative and co-design approaches to develop a 'data stories' storytelling tool. The project supported people working and studying in higher education to create and share anonymous stories about what the future of surveillance in higher education might look like. This chapter explores the context for this work and draws out some themes from these stories, exploring a range of responses to surveillance that are expressed in them. We describe how the data stories tool was mobilised to produce a space for people to make and share new meanings around surveillance, in the form of Participatory Speculative Fictions, which have potential for working with and possibly reconfiguring a range of networked learning futures.