Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of an uncanny digital pedagogy. Drawing on theories of the uncanny from psychoanalysis, cultural studies and educational philosophy, it considers how being online defamiliarises teaching, asking us to question and consider anew established academic practices and conventions. It touches on recent thinking on higher education as troublesome, anxiety-inducing and 'strange', viewing online learning and teaching practices through the lens of an uncanny which is productively disruptive in its challenging of the 'certainties' of place, body, time and text. Uncanny pedagogies are seen as a generative way of working with the new ontologies of the digital.