Digital wayfaring: posthuman textual practices in the university

Professor Lesley Gourlay

University College London

Mainstream educational discourses tend to portray digital technologies and devices either as inert ‘tools’ at the fingertips of an implicitly neoliberal student subject, or alternatively as a force to be feared, and therefore ‘harnessed’. I will suggest in this seminar that both of these views are problematic and inaccurate, leading to a collapse into utopian / dystopian binaries, and fantasies around digital ‘magic’ and the disembodied ‘user’. I will propose an alternative posthumanist reading of digital literacies which centres embodiment, materiality, mobilities, and spatiality into our understanding of emergent digital knowledge practices. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s concept of the line and wayfaring, I will make a case for a different conception of textual practices in the digital university, arguing that unacknowledged humanist positionings, while superficially giving the appearance of ‘student centredness’, in fact serve to reinscibe an ideologically freighted notion of the prototypical student, limiting possibilities for knowledge practices. The implications of this analysis for policy, practice and research will be discussed.  

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