4. Liberal Education and the Capitalocene in American Higher Education

Data-driven control is remaking American higher education as the Capitalocene is remaking environment around us. In higher education, how might we orientate the queer potential of liberal education to produce the conditions of possibility of an Earth beyond the Capitalocene and data-driven control, an Earth that produces expansive notions of student success and racially just futures? I take up this inquiry in three sections. First, I establish relations between the orientation of the Capitalocene and the apparatus of data-driven control to develop a critical new materialisms analytic. I then diffract the practices of a student success initiative at a west coast university through this analytic. I end with an exploration of the potential of liberal education, as understood to queer the surface between the determinate and the indeterminate, to create the conditions of anti-instrumentalist, anti-racist change.