In fascinating lecture by Jamie Peck on conjunctural analysis. It’s left me thinking about the problem of context in digital education: ignored or seen as immutable in much orthodox ed tech research but fixated upon in critical ed tech as something ‘out there’ which explains what happens ‘in here’. What’s lost is the sense of the causal knots through which the empirically particularly is constituted through entanglement with more general processes. The context of ed tech is *in* the education, the technology and everything in between. It moulds the case rather than being something outside it.
I really like the focus on ‘failures of explanation’: categories failing to adequately account for the empirical variety of cases. We can sit productively in this gap in contrast to an empiricism which seeks to dispenses with theory, or theoreticism which subsumes them into a master category. Conventional case studies seek to identify a case which embodies a unified trend, whereas conjunctural cases explore the multiple and often contradictory processes at work within a specific case site.
Mark Carrigan 