The Post-Pandemic University has issued two new call-outs for participants. The first is for a multi-stage project examining digital inequalities in education – issues which predate the COVID crisis but have, unquestionably, been brought into sharper relief by it. The project will seek to explore how digital inequalities may be resolved, or formed anew, […]
Farewell, Hand on Bollocks, Farewell, Basil Brush, Farewell, Seaside Drunk and Sea Cow You’re silent and weeping under history’s crush Your name’s your memorial now See you, German Helmet, So long, Tanked Up Ted, Goodbye, Sausage Stuffer and God Your names resonate through the roads of my head The names […]
History’s been leaning on me lately;I can feel the future breathing down my neckAnd all the things I thought were trueWhen I was young, and you were tooTurned out to be brokenAnd I don’t know what comes nextIn a world that has decidedThat it’s going to lose its mindBe more […]
I thought this was an intriguing call for papers: Guest edited by Dennis Bruining, Holly Randell-Moon, and Saartje TackThis special issue /Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies –Power /invites contributions that critically examine how researchmethods, methodologies, theories, practices and institutions constitutesomatechnics. Somatechnics here is understood broadly as an approach thebody/ […]
The light we find in these dialogues, the illumination of what was previously in the dark, reflects the refraction of thought which is possible in dyadic interaction. The mutual recognition of the partners in conversation leaves the thought they brought to their interaction turning into something else by virtue of that interaction
The ambient visibility which social platforms create within and between organisations will tend to amplify the experience of the gap, as reflections on it (complaints, jokes, rants etc) will circulate more broadly than would otherwise be the case.
There’s lots of insights in this Ofcom study of media use in the UK over the last year. It suggests the pandemic has catalysed a number of changes in how people relate to the internet: There’s a possibility that non-access has shrunk significantly (from 11% to 6% from March 2020 […]
We’re excited to announce a collaboration with the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) to launch a global dialogue about the digital divide in higher education. The ACU’s new podcast series will explore how the work of universities is changed by the digital revolution and how they can use their position to confront the challenges posed by digital technology. Each episode will feature academics and administrators from around the world debating issues such as social inclusion, digital skills and the future of learning.
We need to recognise the pandemic doesn’t have an ‘off’ switch, but rather will fade through a gradual process of normalising for increasingly large swathes of people alongside an ever present background of resurgent threat. This means that we won’t have a return to ‘normality’, but rather a slow, precarious and contested transition into a new reality.
In the last year we have been forced to disengage from the larger society, with so much of our emotional energy turning towards sustaining close relationships at a distance through the affordances of social platforms. Even when we’re ‘opening up’ the folk epidemiological self-consciousness of the last year can’t be wished away, with wider interactions (accurately) coded as vectors of transmission.
I didn’t come looking for loveI didn’t come to pick a fightI didn’t come to wave or take picturesPander to some benefactor, ring on every broken fingerWon’t extend my wings to be clippedI know the culture here is to stay humble but shitIf we all go round bowed heads, button-lippedIf […]
From Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again loc 398: Bad sex emerges from gender norms in which women cannot be equal agents of sexual pursuit, and in which men are entitled to gratification at all costs. It occurs because of inadequacies and inequalities in access to sexual literacy, […]
I’ve found the approach of Diana Laurillard extremely helpful for articulating what I’ve tended to think of as user cultures and public pedagogies for social media within higher education. As she puts it on pg 2 of her book of the same name, “education must now begin to drive its […]
There’s not an ‘off’ switch to a pandemic but rather a tendency for it to fade as a daily concern for ever larger swathes of the population, in a process of normalisation liable to be interrupted by resurgences which can easily be cast as coming from undesirable elements who are outside the mainstream of society.
I thought THE’s Chris Havergal discussion (viz 21-22 mins) about the effects of social media on the coverage of universities was extremely interesting. This is something I wrote about a few years ago as the shift from the ivory tower to the glass tower which is a metaphor which didn’t […]
Digital inequalities have long existed within education, both within traditional educational spaces and practice, and within specifically digital interactions. These inequalities have deep roots in extant socio-cultural and socio-economic inequalities, and yet emerge in unique ways through the macro and micro dynamics of education and digital technologies.
We die so the others can be bornWe age so the others can be youngThe point of life is live, loveIf you can, then pass it on, right?
From Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People pg 33-34: Libraries are not the kinds of institutions that most social scientists, policy makers, and community leaders usually bring up when they discuss social capital and how to build it. Since Tocqueville, most leading thinkers about social and civic life have extolled […]
We can’t find meaning in the world, in the sense of a process of maturing and coming to find a place for ourselves which is satisfying and sustainable, simply through the internalisation of a symbolic order and/or the replication of our natal circumstances.
