Postdigital Disconnects

This book employs a critical discourse ethnographic approach to map the production of social meaning in digital media in education, drawing on insights from Switzerland to unpack the disconnects that arise in thinking postdigitally and ways forward for rethinking socio-cultural approaches. Grounded in Foucault-influenced, linguistically-oriented discourse studies, the book calls attention to the ways in which educational discourse has increasingly promoted digital media as a means of justifying curriculum change. Using data from policy documents, participant observation, and interviews, Mathier charts how this rhetoric manifests itself in the combination of top-down policies, on-the-ground implementation, and the lived experiences of students outside the classroom, and, in turn, surfaces broader disconnects. The volume explores how digital education is increasingly shaped by platform capitalism, how young people’s experiences are disregarded in formal knowledge production, and how the prevalence of digital teaching and learning contributes to issues of access and inequality. Through a critical discursive approach, Mathier demonstrates the need for literacy practices in postdigital education to interrogate the ways in which digital media and education are entangled in larger socio-political practices. This book will appeal to students and scholars in critical discourse studies, critical literacy studies, digital communication, education research, and linguistic ethnography.

This book employs a critical discourse ethnographic approach to map the production of social meaning in digital media in education, drawing on insights from Switzerland to unpack the disconnects that arise in thinking postdigitally and ways forward for rethinking socio-cultural approaches. Grounded in Foucault-influenced, linguistically-oriented discourse studies, the book calls attention to the ways in which educational discourse has increasingly promoted digital media as a means of justifying curriculum change. Using data from policy documents, participant observation, and interviews, Mathier charts how this rhetoric manifests itself in the combination of top-down policies, on-the-ground implementation, and the lived experiences of students outside the classroom, and, in turn, surfaces broader disconnects. The volume explores how digital education is increasingly shaped by platform capitalism, how young people’s experiences are disregarded in formal knowledge production, and how the prevalence of digital teaching and learning contributes to issues of access and inequality. Through a critical discursive approach, Mathier demonstrates the need for literacy practices in postdigital education to interrogate the ways in which digital media and education are entangled in larger socio-political practices. This book will appeal to students and scholars in critical discourse studies, critical literacy studies, digital communication, education research, and linguistic ethnography.

This collection makes the case for existing critical discourse analysis theory and methods to meaningfully engage with the communicative parameters, power dynamics, and technological affordances of contemporary digital spaces. This book lends a critical focus on discursive practices operating through the paradigm of social media communication, addressing the crucial interface of discourse and the participatory web with disciplinary rigour and a well-balanced focus. This volume features chapters highlighting a diverse range of methods, including multi-sited ethnography, multimodality, argumentation studies, and topic modelling, as applied to a global range of case studies to present a holistic portrait of the latest methodological and theoretical debates in this space. The collection demonstrates the many and pervasive impacts of digital mediation on established discursive practices that are (re-)shaping existing social values, practices, and demands. In so doing, the collection advocates for a new tradition in critical discourse research, one which is rigorous in accounting for both solid discursive frameworks and the evolving complexity of digital platforms, and which triangulates methodologies in order to fully make sense of contemporary discursive practices and power relations on the online–offline continuum. This collection will be of interest to students and scholars in critical discourse studies, digital communication, media studies, and anthropology.

This book conceptualizes ecopedagogies as forms of educational innovation and critique that emerge from, negotiate, debate, produce, resist, and/or overcome the shifting and expansive postdigital ecosystems of humans, machines, nonhuman animals, objects, stuff, and other forms of matter. Contemporary postdigital ecosystems are determined by a range of new bioinformational reconfigurations in areas including capitalism, imperialism, settler-colonialism, and ontological hierarchies more generally. Postdigital ecopedagogies name a condition, a question, and a call for experimentation to link pedagogical research and practice to challenges of our moment. They pose living, breathing, expanding, contracting, fluid, and spatial conditions and questions of our non-chronological present. This book presents analyses of that present from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to education studies, philosophy, politics, sociology, arts, and architecture.

This book challenges the notion that static principles of inclusive practice can be embedded and measured in Higher Education. It introduces the original concept of Postdigital Positionality as a dynamic lens through which inclusivity policies in universities might be reimagined.

The book presents a cross-disciplinary overview of critical issues at the intersections of biology, information, and society. Based on theories of bioinformationalism, viral modernity, the postdigital condition, and others, this book explores two inter-related questions: Which new knowledge ecologies are emerging? Which philosophies and research approaches do they require? The book argues that the 20th century focus on machinery needs to be replaced, at least partially, by a focus on a better understanding of living systems and their interactions with technology at all scales – from viruses, through to human beings, to the Earth’s ecosystem. This change of direction cannot be made by a simple relocation of focus and/or funding from one discipline to another. In our age of the Anthropocene, (human and planetary) biology cannot be thought of without (digital) technology and society. Today’s curious bioinformational mix of blurred and messy relationships between physics and biology, old and new media, humanism and posthumanism, knowledge capitalism and bio-informational capitalism defines the postdigital condition and creates new knowledge ecologies. The book presents scholarly research defining new knowledge ecologies built upon emerging forms of scientific communication, big data deluge, and opacity of algorithmic operations. Many of these developments can be approached using the concept of viral modernity, which applies to viral technologies, codes and ecosystems in information, publishing, education, and emerging knowledge (journal) systems. It is within these overlapping theories and contexts, that this book explores new bioinformational philosophies and postdigital knowledge ecologies.

This edited volume builds upon the premise that online learning is not separate from the social and material world, and is made up of embodied, socially-meaningful experiences. It is founded on a “postdigital” perspective in which, much more than interactions with keyboards, computer screens, hardware or software, the learning that happens on online postgraduate programmes spills out into professional and informal settings, making connections with what comes before and after any formally-scheduled tasks. Unlike other books relating to online education, this book combines a theoretical perspective, in which the digital, physical and social are all interconnected within complex educational ecologies, with a focus grounded in postgraduate practice. This focus has important implications for the kinds of students and learning that are explored in the chapters of the book. This book provides an important contribution to the knowledge of what is required to produce quality, online postgraduate programmes at the level of teachers, curriculum designers, faculty developers and policy-makers.

Experiential Theatres is a collaboratively edited and curated collection that delivers key insights into the processes of developing experiential performance projects and the pedagogies behind training theatre artists of the twenty-first century. Experiential refers to practices where the audience member becomes a crucial member of the performance world through the inclusion of immersion, participation, and play. As technologies of communication and interactivity have evolved in the postdigital era, so have modes of spectatorship and performance frameworks. This book provides readers with pedagogical tools for experiential theatre making that address these shifts in contemporary performance and audience expectations. Through case studies, interviews, and classroom applications the book offers a synthesis of theory, practical application, pedagogical tools, and practitioner guidance to develop a praxis-based model for university theatre educators training today’s theatre students. Experiential Theatres presents a holistic approach for educators and students in areas of performance, design, technology, dramaturgy, and theory to help guide them through the processes of making experiential performance.