The postdigital turn: Philosophy, education, research

Abstract

This article develops a post-determinist and a post-instrumentalist understanding of education and educational research through the lens of postdigital theory. We begin with historicizing current postdigital research by showing its intellectual ancestry and recognizing its rapidly changing nature. We move on to current state of the art, which we present in three wide themes. The first theme is the great convergence of various lower-level techno-scientific convergences, such as analogue–digital, physics–biology, and biology–information, which results in new epistemologies, ontologies and practices. The second theme is some consequences of the great convergence for education and pedagogy, which result in new postdigital ecopedagogies. The third theme is postdigital research, which is reconfigured by the great convergence towards a closer collaboration between traditional scientific fields and disciplines. We briefly outline four such reconfigurations (multidisciplinary, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and antidisciplinarity) and their implications. The article concludes with a brief list of directions for future work in the field.