Postdigital Science and Education - Call for Papers - Postdigital / More-Than-Digital Meaning-Making

The study of how meaning is made is distributed across various subfields, including applied linguistics, literacy studies, and social semiotics.  Arguably, these fields have been characterised by a fluidity in terms of scope and boundaries. Although this may have led to an over preponderance of boundary patrolling, it is - we suggest – an overall strength, in that these fields of scholarship can readily flex to encompass social, political and mediatic change in meaning-making, drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological resources from other disciplines.   

In recent years, studies of language and communication have also expanded their methodological and theoretical horizons to reconceptualise how we view communication – moving through a recognition of the multimodal nature of semiosis (e.g., Kress and van Leeuwen 2001), to a broadening of the conceptual and analytical frame of applied linguistics by introducing the concept of translanguaging (e.g., Wei 2018) as a more encompassing framing.

These theoretical and methodological developments have – we propose - led to a recognition of not only the multimodal, but also the intrinsically situated, embodied, and sociomaterial nature of meaning-making. This has been enriched in recent years by a recognition of the concept of posthumanism and its relevance to reading (Hayles 2012), to applied linguistics more broadly (Pennycook 2018; O’Halloran 2022), also reflected in literacy studies (e.g., Parry et al. 2016; Spector et al. 2018; Gourlay 2021). A parallel literature has focused on ‘digital literacies’ – however, this area has tended to use the term ‘literacies’ predominantly in the sense of ‘know-how’ with regard to using digital technology and platforms, as opposed to focusing on the linguistic and semiotic aspects of digitally-mediated meaning-making.

Recent work has begun to address this gap, with a focus on postdigital literacies (e.g., Apperley et al 2016; Bhatt 2023), postdigital storytelling (Jordan 2020), postdigital stylistics (O’Halloran 2022), and the influence of the digital on meaning-making (e.g., Giannoulis and Wilde 2019; Wagener 2021). Over the same period, work in the phenomenology of practice has focused on writing online (e.g. Adams 2016, van Manen and Adams 2017), media theorists have also turned their attention to the digital in education (e.g., Friesen 2017), and the ‘possibility of a digital university’ (Marin 2021), while scholars in science and technology studies have explored the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 2015) of education and technologies (e.g., Rahm 2023).

The recent emergence of generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT has intensified and broadened out the debate in academia and beyond regarding the effects of text-generating digital technologies on writing (e.g., Sharples 2022), linked to broader discussions of the ethics of AI in education (e.g., Holmes and Porayska-Pomsta 2022), raising fundamental questions surrounding agency, authorship, assessment, the nature of text and the semiotic, sociotechnical and embodied entanglements between digital technologies and the human.

We thus acknowledge the contested nature of the term ‘postdigital’ and propose to also include the notion of ‘more-than-digital’ (Gourlay 2023), to hold open a provisional space for theoretical and empirical development of this area. We invite critical, theoretical, and empirical papers which explore the following themes and related questions:

• Practices of discourse, and other forms of meaning-making which are more-than-digital
• The sociotechnical imaginaries of the digital, AIs, and authorship.
• The nature of texts and semiotic assemblages in the ‘more-than-digital’ age.
• The embodied and gestural natures of meaning-making and scholarship.
• The relationships between devices, screens, platforms, and the human.
• The ethics of generative AIs and human-nonhuman meaning-making.
• Implications for interdisciplinary theory and research.

Guest Editors 

Lesley Gourlay (this opens in a new tab) (University College London) and Ibrar Bhatt (this opens in a new tab) (Queen’s University Belfast)

Important dates

30 October 2023 – Deadline for 700-word abstracts

15 November 2023 – Authors notified and invited to write full manuscript

15 March 2024 – Deadline for full draft manuscripts

15 April 2024 – Deadline for reviewer feedback

15 May 2024 – Deadline for final submission of revised articles

References 

Adams, C. (2016). Programming the gesture of writing: On the algorithmic paratexts of the digital. Educational Theory, 66(4), 479-497. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12184 (this opens in a new tab).

Apperley, T., Jayemanne, D., & Nansen, B. (2016). Postdigital literacies: materiality, mobility and the aesthetics of recruitment. In B. Parry, C. Burnett, & G. Merchant (Eds.), Literacy, Media and Technology: Past, Present and Future. London, UK: Bloomsbury.

Bhatt, I. (2023). Postdigital Literacies. In P. Jandrić (Ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Postdigital Science and Education. Cham: Springer.

Giannoulis, E., & Wilde, L. (2019). Emoticons, Kaomoji, and Emoji: The Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age. London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429491757 (this opens in a new tab).

Gourlay, L. (2021). Posthumanism and the Digital University: Texts, Bodies and Materialities. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Gourlay, L. (2023). Postdigital / more-than-digital: ephemerality, seclusion and copresence in the university. In P. Jandrić, A. MacKenzie, & J. Knox (Eds.), Postdigital Research: Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspectives (pp. 51-68). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31299-1_4 (this opens in a new tab).

Hayles, N. K. (2012). How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Holmes, W., & Porayska-Pomsta, K. (Eds.). (2022). The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Education. London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429329067 (this opens in a new tab).

Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S. H. (2009). Containing the atom: Sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva 47(2), 119-146. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4 (this opens in a new tab).

Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S. H. (Eds.). (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. London: University of Chicago Press.

Jordan, S. 2020. Postdigital Storytelling: Poetics, Praxis, Research. London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315112251 (this opens in a new tab).

Marin, L. (2021). On The Possibility of a Digital University: Thinking and Mediatic Displacement at the University. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65976-9 (this opens in a new tab).

O’Halloran, K. (2022). Postdigital stylistics: creative multimodal interpretation of poetry and internet mashups. English in Education, 56(1), 73-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2021.1937112 (this opens in a new tab).

O’Halloran, K. (2022). Posthumanism and corpus linguistics. In A. O’Keefe & M. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 675-692). London, UK: Routledge.

Pennycook, A. (2018). Posthumanist Applied Linguistics. London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315457574 (this opens in a new tab).

Rahm, L. (2023). Educational imaginaries: Governance at the intersection of technology and education. Journal of Education Policy, 38(1), 46-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2021.1970233 (this opens in a new tab).

Sharples, M. (2022). Automated essay writing: an AIED opinion. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 32(4), 1119-1126. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-022-00300-7 (this opens in a new tab).

Spector, K., Kuby, C., & Johnson Thiel, J. (Eds.). (2018). Posthumanism and Literacy Education: Knowing / Becoming / Doing Literacies. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315106083 (this opens in a new tab).

van Manen, M., & Adams, C. (2017). The phenomenology of space in writing online. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 4(1), 10-21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2008.00480.x (this opens in a new tab).

Wagener, A. (2021). The postdigital emergence of memes and GIFs: meaning, discourse and hypernarrative creativity. Postdigital Science and Education, 3(3), 831-850. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00160-1 (this opens in a new tab).

Wei, L. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9-30. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039 (this opens in a new tab).