Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in South Africa and the UK, this paper brings into dialogue works on platform labour and digital education. Connecting discussions of academic precarity and care to the study of a growing reserve army of online academics, I discuss new divisions and vulnerabilities in academia.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade the literatures on digital higher education and platform work have expanded, albeit rarely in conversation. This paper aims to bridge this gap. Building on my fieldworks on academic labour and care (Ivancheva et al 2019) and on 'unbundled' higher education in South Africa and the UK (Ivancheva et al f.c.) I discuss how academic labour has been reorganised through the entry of online platforms into the higher education market worldwide. Online Program Management (OPM) platform providers partner with selected universities based on their global ranking, and reinforce (instead of rehabilitating, as they promise) old class and racial divisions in and between the Global North and South. In the paper, I discuss how this dynamic is reflected in the everyday practices of university workers. Expanding their offer from overcrowded campuses to emergent markets of off-campus students, 'elite' universities and their OMP partners rely not only on contingent, but also on outsourced, fragmented and piecemeal online academic labour. The latter is performed predominantly by women and academics in the Global South in need of flexible employment and/or extra income. Thus, increasingly expensive online programs targeting professional middle classes in the Global South rely on a cheap and precarious academic reserve army who offers not only education but also pastoral care for a complex and alienated online student population. Through this empirical study, I revisit works on platform labour and digital education, in attempt to theorise these complex new divisions and vulnerabilities in the academic profession.