Postdigital Learning Spaces: Towards convivial, equitable and sustainable spaces for learning
The concept of the ‘postdigital’ recognises that digital technologies are woven into the fabric of our everyday lives and surroundings. Devices, data flows, and digital infrastructure have overlapped and become entangled with pre-existing technologies, practices, and other human and non-human objects. Digital resources are a regular, rather than remarkable, part of our educational environments. Postdigital thinking offers a nuanced and productive way of critically exploring the complex and changing nature of our learning spaces. To date, the relationship between learning, space and digital technology has been investigated mostly in relation to the higher education settings, and predominantly within economically privileged and technologically rich contexts. In this edited collection we are extending the horizons of existing scholarship by critically exploring postdigital learning spaces across a broad range of educational, cultural and global settings.
We are undertaking this project amid profound ecological and humanitarian challenges affecting our world, including climate crisis, extremism, global pandemics, warfare and the mass displacement of people. In part, these complex challenges are shaped and influenced by the confluence of three main elements: the broader natural environment or ‘the nature’, the people who inhabit these environments or ‘the humans’, and the ways technologies permeate people’s everyday living, learning and working or ‘the digital’. From a postdigital perspective, digital technologies affect and are bound together with economic, sociological, political and ethical systems.
This edited collection brings empirical, theoretical and conceptual work related to learning spaces and practices that draw on this convergence of the nature, the humans and the digital, in order to contribute to transformative action (that is likely) to effect change. The book asks, how can learning spaces be more convivial, equitable or sustainable, considering the challenges our world is facing? With a view to extending the reach and impact of existing postdigital scholarship, the book explores learning spaces beyond higher education. This includes learning spaces associated with cultural heritage, creative arts, traveller communities, refugees and displaced persons, schools, outdoor education, the city and elsewhere.
