Utbildningssociologiska seminariet med Pablo Lillo Cea

Much of the digital infrastructure foundational for contemporary life, such as the core architecture of the internet, the open-source operating systems that power the cloud, and the cryptography securing digital communications, was built during the second half of the twentieth century at higher education institutions. Several decades later, universities now depend on a handful of US-based for-profit corporations for the digital means of academic and scientific work. Historians have traced this reversal and critical EdTech scholarship has documented some of its most recent effects, yet what it means for higher education as a field remains underexplored. This article draws on Bourdieu's field theory to argue that the reversal amounts to a process of dispossession, i.e. the progressive separation of the field from control over the digital tools it once built, and are today crucial for its craft. A socio-historical analysis of four phases, from academic self-provision to AI-driven extraction, identifies the professionalisation of IT governance as a main turning point, one that reclassified infrastructure decisions as technical-administrative matters and placed them below the field's threshold of recognition before the dependency had consolidated.

Episodes such as the sudden shift to remote learning in 2020 and the integration of AI into established platforms have since exposed the dependency without displacing this classification. The result is a self-reinforcing dynamic, where the criteria through which the field now evaluates infrastructure are the very efficiency and cybersecurity standards that produced the dependency. Swedish higher education serves as an illustrative case. The article closes by sketching an empirical research agenda.