The Transdisciplinary Challenge of Postdigital Literacy
Thursday, September 21
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. PST
Presenters
Dr. Natasa Lackovic
Dr. Michael Ling
Dr. Alin Olteanu
Dr. Cary Campbell
This in-person workshop addresses the transdisciplinary challenge posed by postdigital philosophy to research in education and specifically literacy studies. This builds on an earlier researchhub workshop and recent research, introducing and articulating the need for transdisciplinary, semiotic and multimodal research in education.
While highly insightful, the postdigital is notoriously difficult to pin down — ‘hard to define, messy, unpredictable, digital and analog, technological and non-technological, biological, and informational’, as something that ‘is both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation’ (Jandrić et al. 2018: 895). A central premise of postdigital educational theory is that dualisms such as digital/analog and off-line/on-line are inadequate for educational research and practice in the wake of the rapid social and technological transformations of mass digitisation. Knox (2019) suggests that the ‘postdigital’ can be understood as a call to understand both what is new and changing about our relationships with the digital, as well as ‘recognising the ways that such technology is already embedded in, and entangled with, existing social practices and economic and political systems’ (p. 58).
This recent and rapid reconfiguration of how we communicate and learn necessitates that educational researchers theorize and explore new understandings of literacy in the face of these postdigital reconfigurations. In this talk, participants and presenters will collaboratively discuss postdigital & multimodal literacy as a transdisciplinary challenge facing educational research, highlighting and unpacking everyday pedagogical and curricular events, processes and practices already tinged with the postdigital.
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