36.2266, Reviews: The University and the Algorithmic Gaze: Lesley Gourlay (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2266. Sat Jul 26 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2266, Reviews: The University and the Algorithmic Gaze: Lesley Gourlay (2025)

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Date: 26-Jul-2025
From: David Carrasco Coquillat [davidcarrascoquillat at gmail.com]
Subject: Anthropological Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, General Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Lesley Gourlay (2025)


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.



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