“What’s in agency?”
Speculative fiction and utopian imagination for alternative postdigital future(s) of higher education
For the past three years, the CARDE (Critical Applied Research of Digitalization in Education) research group has been studying the digitalization of higher education using speculative and utopian methods (Suoranta et al., 2021). This study was initially driven by our concern that staff and students are underrepresented in the implementation and envisioning of digitalization’s future (Teräs et al., 2020; Teräs et al., 2022).
It sometimes feels like digitalization is an agent or a force that we cannot affect. New systems, platforms, generative AI etc. come and go, and sometimes leave us breathless with their “disruption”. Instead of a genuinely collective imagination, new developments seem to be driven by a dominantly positive technological narrative, which we’ve witnessed e.g. in “official document utopias” (Teräs et al., 2023), leading to sporadic adoption of digitalization.
During our journey we’ve come to realize how increasingly entangled and occupied our daily practices are with(in) the digital, pushing our very being towards the ‘postdigital’ (Cramer, 2014; Jandrić et al., 2018). As a result of our reflection and interpretation of the current situation, we’ve sought to create opportunities to reflect with speculative and utopian methods to collaboratively imagine and reflect equitable and sustainable postdigital future(s).
More about our journey at https://carde.group.
Sources
Cramer, F. (2014). What is “postdigital”? APRJA, 3(1), 11–24. https://doi.org/10.7146/aprja.v3i1.116068
Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000
Suoranta, J., Teräs, M., Teräs, H., Jandrić, P., Ledger, S., Macgilchrist, F., & Prinsloo, P. (2021). Speculative Social Science Fiction of Digitalization in Higher Education: From What Is to What Could Be. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00260-6
Teräs, H., Teräs, M., & Suoranta, J. (2022). The life and times of university teachers in the era of digitalization: A tragedy. Learning, Media and Technology, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2048393
Teräs, M., Suoranta, J., Teräs, H., & Curcher, M. (2020). Post-Covid-19 Education and Education Technology ‘Solutionism’: A Seller’s Market. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(3), 863–878. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00164-x
About the Author
Marko Teräs, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Social Sciences