Rate My Professor Laura Smithers

Laura Elizabeth Smithers serves as an Assistant Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Nevada, Reno. She holds a Ph.D. in Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education from the University of Oregon (2018), an M.S.Ed. in Educational Psychology from the University of Florida (2006), and dual B.A. degrees in Government and Politics (with honors) and Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park (2004). Prior to her faculty appointment, Smithers gained a decade of professional experience in student-athlete academic services as an academic counselor and a learning specialist.

Her research examines the possible futures created and foreclosed by assessment regimes in undergraduate education, connecting higher education and student affairs with poststructural theory, feminist new materialisms, and queer theory, alongside interests in low theory, film, and popular culture. Current work addresses the roles of affect and ontopower in the student success movement and the datafication of higher education, including predictive analytics, concepts of impact, and campus desires for productivity that prioritize quantifiable revenue over educational value. This includes comparative studies of productivity logics across national and institutional contexts with collaborators in Finland. Key publications include "Predictive analytics and the creation of the permanent present" (Learning, Media and Technology, 2023), "Becoming-academic in the neoliberal academy: A collective biography" (Gender and Education, 2020), "Qualitative inquiry in the making: A minor pedagogy" with L.A. Mazzei (Qualitative Inquiry, 2020), "Student success as preemption: Predictive constructions of futures-to-never-come" (Futures, 2020), "Reordering student affairs: from minority absorption to a radical new" with P.W. Eaton (Critical Studies in Education, 2021), and "How Speculative Reform Rewrites the Present in American Higher Education" (Journal of Higher Education, 2024).