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- Hillman, Thomas, 1978, et al.
(författare)
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Epistemologies of data visualisations: On producing certainties, geographies and digitalities in critical educational research
- 2023
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Ingår i: On_education. ; :12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the age of data-driven research, data visualisations have emerged and proliferated as indispensable tools for understanding complex phenomena. Visualisations can be compelling. They communicate objectivity, efficiency and authority. However, data visualisations are not neutral. They embody and convey particular epistemological perspectives, shaping how knowledge is produced, circulated and understood (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020; Ratner & Ruppert, 2019; Williamson, 2016). In scholarship, visualisations are, like other scientific practices, ‘designed to make the invisible visible, the evanescent permanent, the abstract concrete’, and in this sense, visualisations are ways in which scholarship ‘discovers the world anew’ (Daston & Lunbeck, 2011, p. 1). This article explores the epistemologies inherent in data visualisations when they are produced within critical studies of the datafication of education. It takes up the call for researchers to interrogate the tensions that arise when the ‘digital...
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| 2. |
- Hillman, Thomas, 1978, et al.
(författare)
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Inequality, the production of difference, and local school platforms in a global digital world
- 2023
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Ingår i: American Educational Research Association. Annual Meeting Program. - 0163-9676.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Digital platforms are increasingly present in schools around the world, though the ways in which they are present are far from universal. In this study, we argue that different platforms and the practices that are occasioned through their use may reflect and/or reinforce inequalities between and within different school contexts. This argument is made following the claim made by, amongst others, Light, Burgess and Duguay (2018) that software are cultural goods that express visions about ideal users and uses. With this claim as an orientation, and drawing on Fourcade’s (2016) notion of classificatory situations, we examine local school platforms used in five different countries to identify ways in which local digital infrastructures in schools are entangled with educational inequalities.
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| 3. |
- Macgilchrist, Felicitas, et al.
(författare)
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Designing Postdigital Futures : Which Designs? Whose Futures?
- 2024
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Ingår i: Postdigital Science and Education. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2524-4868 .- 2524-485X. ; 6:1, s. 13-24
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Designing technology for education is never only a problem-solving practice. It is always already about creating spaces for inherently political and affective sociotechnical future relations (Light and Akama 2014). These can point towards ‘big futures’, i.e. radical ruptures and epochal change, or ‘little futures’, emergent processes in mundane, everyday practices (Michael 2017; Pink et al. 2022). Beginning with these assumptions, this commentary identifies key issues for concern at the nexus of futures, education, and design in the postdigital condition, in which digital technologies are embedded throughout educational spaces, but no longer conceived as a panacea for socio-economic-ecological ills. Instead, power relations and tensions lie at the heart of assumptions about designing futures. In the midst of the inequitable ‘planetary ruins’ in which we now live, learn, and teach (Tsing et al. 2017), we need new narratives about the future (Facer 2019).Exploring these old and new narratives, this commentary suggests that practitioners, researchers, and others impacted by sociotechnical systems need to design futures and think about how to design futures that matter to them; otherwise, they (we) hand over design decisions to dominant actors. These design decisions impact not only technicalities, but also how education — and thus the future — will be configured. Yet there is no unanimous understanding of what ‘good design’ or a ‘desirable future’ looks like. As soon as ‘we’ begin to design, tensions and struggles unfold. This commentary fundamentally questions whether educational futures can be designed at all, given that education is inherently uncertain and beautifully risky (Biesta 2013). Tangled up in our own contradictions, we (the authors of this commentary) simultaneously question a sense of design optimism while also optimistically designing educational interventions and research.Against this background, this commentary highlights three issues: (1) What possibilities emerge from decentring an engineering approach to designing postdigital futures? We explore alternative approaches to design that avoid the engineering logic predominant in education today. (2) What drives innovation in design? Drawing on feminist approaches to innovation, we reflect on the role of care in postdigital futures and extend care to a damaged planet. (3) Where are the limits of design in education? A critique of design practices means turning critical analysis onto the very concept of design and interrogating the limits of design.Overall, the commentary illustrates how ‘design’ is contested today, with significant implications for the future. Far from a solutionist Silicon Valley approach to designing digital futures, we flag a ‘postdigital’ design that assumes — as does postdigital research more broadly (Jandrić et al. 2018; Knox 2019; Macgilchrist 2021) — that realities are messy, muddy, noisy; that nothing is purely, smoothly digital; and that the very idea of ‘designing futures’ signals how design is entangled with epistemological and ontological groundings, with political and affective relations, with historical legacies of exclusion and oppression, and with sociomaterial and planetary impact.
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