Posthumanism and the Digital University: Texts, Bodies and Materialities

Description

It is a commonplace in educational policy and theory to claim that digital technology has 'transformed' the university, the nature of learning and even the essence of what it means to be a scholar or a student. However, these claims have not always been based on strong research evidence. What are students and scholars actually doing in the day-to-day life of the digital university? This book examines in detail how the world of the digital interacts with texts, artefacts, devices and humans, in the contemporary university setting. Weaving together perspectives from a range of thinkers and disciplinary sources, Lesley Gourlay draws on ideas from posthuman and new materialist theory in particular, to open up our understanding about how digital knowledge practices operate. She proposes that digital engagement in the university should not be regarded as 'virtual' or disembodied, but instead may be understood as a complex set of entanglements of the body, texts and material artefacts, making a case that agency and the ways in which knowledge emerges should be regarded as 'more than human'.

Lesley Gourlay is Professor of Education at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, UK.

A robust and refreshing contribution to digital and posthuman scholarship ... In its ambition and skill, Gourlay's book will appeal to researchers and practitioners interested in the increasing digitalization and datafication of higher education. * Postdigital Science and Education * Posthuman and new materialist ideas provide fertile and underexplored terrain for examining the contemporary university through in-depth engagement with 'the fine-grained, detailed "nitty-gritty" of everyday higher education as it unfolds, in a mesh of bodies, nonhuman actors, and technologies' (19). As such, this is a book that should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand what actually happens in universities today. * Learning, Media and Technology * This book undeniably provides both the inspiration and means to bring posthumanism 'down to earth', and to shine a much-needed critical light on the corridors and conduits of the digital university. * Educational Philosophy Theory * A very interesting and provocative take on the idea of what it means to be a "text-consuming humanist" in these digital times we are now living in. Gourlay poses great questions for future thought and implications. * James Pfrehm, Associate Professor of Language and Linguistics, Ithaca College, USA * This book shifts discussions of digital learning in tertiary education in significant ways, arguing that notions of disembodied, 'virtual' interactions overlook the material entanglements of people, knowledge practices, texts and artefacts. Flipped classrooms, online learning and other recent trends are reactionary rather than revolutionary developments. Challenging the idea of the individual human subject engaged in isolated study, Lesley Gourlay presents an absorbing alternative vision of digital epistemic practices seen through a more-than-human lens. * Alastair Pennycook, Distinguished Professor of Language, Society and Education, University of Technology Sydney, Australia *