We are delighted to have this book in the series. As the author explains, it has been a long and difficult journey to completion, which makes the outcome even more welcome. It also means that the book is both up-to-date and extremely timely, given that the HE sector is now publicly in crisis. We hope this book will be valuable to anyone trying to make sense of the complex world of UK HE. For many academics, engaging with bureaucracy can seem boring and take us away from the ‘real’ work, but, as the author points out, ‘not knowing the rules can leave us vulnerable to mythologised (mis)interpretations of how audit processes work and thus complicit in reproducing an academia which could be done differently’. The book has sector-wide and cross-disciplinary relevance, but we would like to see a well-thumbed copy on the desks of vice chancellors and other senior leaders and even on that of the Minister for Education – if only she had the time.

The author begins from her standpoint as a precarious early career feminist academic and used this to inform her analysis of everyday textual practices of academics in UK HE, in the context of an audit culture, and their differential impacts. Órla Murray makes a case that few in the HE sector would disagree with:

I almost did not write this book. A mixture of ill health, a global pandemic, and the postdoctoral job market made it impossible to focus on writing a monograph. I received the book contract in April 2020 just after the first COVID-19 lockdown began in the UK. I’d been applying for lots of academic jobs and fellowships and was still hopeful that I would get a book-writing fellowship or a research job with personal research time to allow me time to write this book. This did not happen, and so instead I tried to squeeze in writing alongside my paid academic work and kept delaying the manuscript submission deadline. My job was initially 4 days a week on a 1-year contract, and so I continued applying for jobs and fellowships, feeling disheartened and exhausted by repeated rejection. While my tiredness was in part due to the imminent end of my employment contract and the global pandemic, increasingly it became apparent that I was also ill. Near the end of 2020, I was hospitalised due to undiagnosed ulcerative colitis and had emergency surgery which saved my life. Thankfully, I had some sick pay, a supportive line manager, and free access to the NHS. But it was notable that while I lay in my hospital bed, I worried about my job. I worried that time off work and my new chronic illness and disability would stop me from surviving the academic rat race.

Why is this relevant to a book about UK university audit cultures? Academic working conditions in the UK are awful. They make us sick and exclude those of us who are already sick, and rely on ableist and classist assumptions about what is possible.

Am I REF-able? This question plagues UK-based academics, whether they are permanently employed or stringing together temporary posts. The REF – the Research Excellence Framework – is the much discussed (and widely hated) UK-wide research assessment exercise, which judges the ‘excellence’ of academic research. The REF results carry prestige and determine research funding for departments and universities. However, the REF has become more than just an audit process: it has produced a powerful discourse around who or what is ‘REF-able’, shaping the way individual academics and their work are judged as valuable or not. Being perceived as REF-able is incredibly important due to the impact on the hiring, firing, and promotion of individual academics and the funding and staffing of departments and research centres. However, REF-ability is an amorphous concept, mixing the formal eligibility criteria of the official REF process with broader value judgements about what will score highly and therefore bring higher star ratings in the REF results and associated funding and prestige. The REF process and notions of REF-ability are deeply mythologised, with (mis)understandings circulating among academics, professional services staff, and university management. This chapter examines the REF as both an official audit process and a discursive framework used to judge the value of academics and their research.

Through a comparison of the official REF 2014 and 2021 guidance and interviews with physicists responsible for REF 2021 submissions, I show how the REF works in practice.

After a discussion of X (Twitter) and the kinds of feelings, sentiments, and practices that it engenders in users, Chapter 7 explores what people do on screens: the social practices, thinking, and being that occur in postdigitality. Pursuing the mission of the book to seek the human in the machine, this chapter attends to how crescent voices act at screens, discovering the many learned and habituated digital literacy practices which allow screen users to perform their identities multimodally in multitudinous and diverse ways. Based on interviewee accounts, this chapter offers a model of postdigital practices which employs the concepts of fishbowls, antholes, rabbitholes, and wormholes, while also drawing on Charles Taylor’s social imaginaries.

The final chapter serves to draw the various strands of the book together, surveying what has been discovered, and expanding on the fundamental arguments of the book. It therefore begins with an analysis of Pinterest, which stands as an emblem of all that literacy means in postdigital times, whether that be sophisticated multimodal practices, durational time, or algorithmic logic. Looking back over the screen lives discussed in the book, including those of the crescent voices and of Samuel Sandor, this chapter crystallizes the personal take on screen lives that the book offers, reiterating the need to ‘undo the digital’ and find the human in, on, with, at, and against screens. It also presents some of the problems scholarship must meet, such as digital inequalities, whether that be in terms of time, awareness, or skill with technology. However, despite the considerable negative forces at work in screen lives which the book has taken care to unravel, this concluding chapter advocates ‘taking the higher ground’ and enacting wonder in interactions with screens.

This chapter introduces the book, laying out its central questions, including what it means to be postdigital, what diverse kinds of life and humanity can be found in screens, and what new technologies such as automation and AI might mean for screen lives. Chapter 1 also describes both the background and aspirations of the book, as well as its structure and a guide on how to approach reading it. Beyond discussing the defining research questions, this chapter also details the ideas underpinning the book, including the notion that there has been a tangible shift between how we related to screens a decade ago and how we do now. In addition, the book is guided by an awareness of the often conflicting and intricate relationships people have with screens, as well as the concept of the ‘smallness of screen lives’, inspired by Deborah Hicks’ notion. The Comfort of Screens is a tapestry which unfolds a story of postdigital life, sewn from the fabric of 17 people’s screen lives, interviews with whom form the backbone of the book. These ‘crescent voices’ are also introduced in this chapter.

Opening with an analysis of Instagram, Chapter 2 is concerned with how to think about postdigitality. Touching on multimodality, time-space-place, and responsive loops, this chapter highlights the contrast between digital life and postdigital life, unravelling the many dimensions of postdigitality. It concludes that postdigitality represents a world of symbiosis, whether that be of body and mind, physical life and screen life, representation and non-representation, immersion and connectivity, or interaction and convergence. These combinations are what lends digital media its unique power to move across time, space, and place. To explore these ideas, Chapter 2 analyses data which has been processed through ATLAS.ti to produce a list of postdigital keywords used by crescent voices.

This chapter begins with a reflection of the Find My iPhone app, employing it as an example of how physical and digital place can exist simultaneously and in interconnected ways. Afterwards, it turns to explaining the notion of physical-digital place as parallel universes, subsequently unravelling this idea through strands taken from across crescent voice interviews. The emphasis of this chapter is on place, or more specifically the intermingling of physical and digital places, whereby the commitments, practices, and imaginaries of screens can shape one’s understandings of place and allow one to form a consciousness that is a kind of home. By employing notions of the ‘digital home’, social imaginaries, digital twins, and a postdigital concept of community, this chapter unsettles the binary between digital and physical spaces, employing Dezuanni’s definition of community to help get at the ways that online spaces feel like home. It explores these ideas primarily through crescent voices and their experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, an event which lent more prominence to practices such as digital twins.

Chapter 4 delves deeper into screen life, adopting an even more human-centred focus, in order to uncover the affective aspect of screen lives. Maintaining an embodied approach, this chapter explores how affective experiences with screens are intentionally elicited through how media is designed, how affect on screens might differ from affect outside screens, and how digital affect can inform practices, and practices induce affect. The chapter begins by defining affect, then digital affect more specifically, before turning to interviewees for their perspectives on how they feel and sense on screens, touching on topics such as micro digital affect, algorithms, and the pandemic. Crescent voices in this chapter help illustrate how digital affect is vital to understanding digital literacy practices and screen lives, especially the double-edged aspects of our affective relationships to screens.