With the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, universities found themselves rapidly adapting to an entirely digital space; every pedagogical interaction became mediated through a series of platforms and apparatuses. As part of their adapting to this condition, many universities swiftly implemented the use of proctoring software, which does the invigilation work normally performed by professors and TAs on campus. Yet there is little evidence that these softwares work, even as they invade students’ privacy, implement facial recognition, record students’ keystrokes, track their eye movements, and collect device data such as IP addresses and URLs visited. As an intersection of university and policing infrastructures, proctoring software extends the surveillance logics and practices of the public physical classroom into the private intimate home, highlighting how these infrastructures operate not only as a “technological substrate of networked services that support the development and deployment of pervasive-computing applications…[but also as] another manifestation of cultural practice” (Dourish and Bell 2007). Proctoring software and the shifts it signals are thus an instance of Byung-chul Han’s concept of the “digital panopticon”, an extension of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as it is engendered by digital technologies and emblematized by social media (Han 2015).
The implementation of proctoring softwares further inscribes carceral logics into our classrooms, which unequally impact students of color, students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, transgender students, undocumented students, and disabled students. Simultaneously, this engenders an environment of distrust, neither of which are beneficial for student learning (Lang 2013). The centering of carceral logics and distrust in the classroom were in place long before the move online, but they have become intensified and have expanded in codification in the past year (Lingel and Sinnreich 2016). We thus ask: how does proctoring software reinforce a carceral infrastructure and shape the meaning/purpose/prioritization of the classroom? How do these surveillance technologies reproduce structures of colonialism, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism? And as universities begin to address what we’ve learnt, gained, and lost over the past year: how can we imagine the (digital) classroom differently?
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Bibliography
Dourish, Paul & Genevieve Bell. 2007. “The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space.” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34(3): 414–430. https://doi.org/10.1068/b32035t
Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The Transparency Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lang, James M. 2013. Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674726239.
Lingel, Jessa, and Aram Sinnreich. 2016. “Incoded Counter-Conduct: What the Incarcerated Can Teach Us About Resisting Mass Surveillance.” First Monday 21(5).