From slogans to frameworks: Embedded values or postdigital positionality?

Abstract

This article explores ways in which higher education (HE) slogans, together with related frameworks and policies, increasingly invade the personal, cultural and positional values of individual staff and students. After a quick exploration of examples of embedded university values that are expected to be ‘lived’, the article outlines some epistemic implications in areas including epistemic positioning, epistemic injustice, epistemic space, data epistemologies, epistemic dominance and epistemic violence. Concluding that epistemologies are always lived, the article explores slogans at the intersections of biology, information and society using the case of excellence. Finally, the article briefly opens up the question of consent. Slogans, frameworks and policy texts exist as all other data assemblages that are subject to regulation. Should they also need to conform to such, or similar, regulations?