This study explores the image sharing site Instagram to reveal how affordances, or uses of the platform, occur within a nexus of technological architecture, sociocultural contexts, and globalized commercial practices. It suggests social actors draw upon Instagram's affordances at material, conceptual, and imaginary levels while using social media. This triadic model for theorizing affordances of Instagram responds to the need for mapping ontologies and typologies of social media within increasingly visual, intercultural, and non-Western contexts. The lenses of critical multimodality and a participant-centered method consider how female Gulf-Arab social media influencers operate through an interplay of shifting affordances in ways that challenge current conceptions of authenticity surrounding social media influencers. It is suggested that the triadic affordances of Instagram, occurring at material, conceptual, and imaginary levels, provide both influencers and followers with strategies of "fantastical authenticity" for navigating conflicting modes of representation and self-presentation within local and globalized economies.

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunberg? Their answers are classified into four main themes and corresponding sections. The first section, 'As we bake the earth, let's try and bake it from scratch', gathers wider philosophical considerations about the intersection between environment, education, and the pandemic. The second section, 'Bump in the road or a catalyst for structural change?', looks more closely into issues pertaining to education. The third section, 'If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you', focuses to Greta Thunberg's messages and their responses. The last section, 'Towards a new (educational) normal', explores future scenarios and develops recommendations for critical emancipatory action. The concluding part brings these insights together, showing that resulting synergy between the answers offers much more then the sum of articles' parts. With its ethos of collectivity, interconnectedness, and solidarity, philosophy of education in a new key is a crucial tool for development of post-pandemic (philosophy of) education.

Social media intersects across physical spaces, digital infrastructures, and social subjectivities in terms of what is being called the “postdigital,” in an increasingly merging offline/online world. But what precisely does it mean to be “postdigital” if you are an Arab woman or social actor in the Global South? How does access to social networking sites, while increasing visibilities, also provide potential for increased agency? This study is concerned with the extent to which Arab women’s self-presentation practices on Instagram could be considered as empowering, or otherwise, within the postdigital condition. First, the study takes Instagram as a case to develop a theoretical framework for considering social media as a tertiary artifact, involving material, routine-symbolic, and conceptual affordances. Second, it applies the artifact framework to explore a corpus of self-presentations by five Arab women influencers. Feminist postdigital theorizing offers unique contributions to problematizing normative, ethnocentric, and neoliberal conceptions of Arab women’s empowerment. The application of the novel framework leads to an interpretative discussion of Arab women’s influencing practices across merging offline/online and transnational boundaries. Overall, the critical perspective begins to reimagine Arab women’s empowerment, not simply as individualized or material processes, but as agencies that are interwoven within the commercialized and conceptual dynamics of visual social media.

Covid-19 At Women's Only University in the Gulf Transitioning to teaching online at a women's only university in the Gulf during the Covid-19 makes me, like millions of other university teachers globally, increasingly reflective. With the world in crisis, there is renewed focus on theoretical tensions within the postdigital condition, and my interest is in unique female insights and their positioning in postdigital theory and practice (Deepwell 2020). How does women's learning intersect across physical spaces, digital infrastructures and learning ecologies? Or is it perhaps somewhere else, across all of these, as well as in-between (Pyyhtinen and Suoranta 2020)? How do these online practices affect women from different cultures? What precisely does it mean to be postdigital if you are female (Jandrić et al. 2019)? How can a postdigital critical pedagogy be informed by feelings of love, kindness and compassion for learning, learners and one another, while hopefully keeping women employed (Petrilli 2017)? These questions were pertinent prior to Covid-19, they are particularly poignant now, and they are imperative for future development of postdigital feminist theory and practice.

Many teachers consider themselves digital immigrants who struggle to keep up with student digital natives. Whether or not this dichotomy still holds true, in a 21 st Century context of teaching and learning, is debatable not least of all because of the exponential development of apps and mobile learning technology. Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult for educators to know where to begin and for students to know how best to use it to advance their studies and improve their writing.Focusing on university students at a pre-university English as Second Language (ESL) program in Dubai, this paper discusses how mobile learning and the use of a range of apps can foster peer and self-editing, aid noticing and enhance ownership of the writing process. It is argued that flipping corrective feedback helps students to notice their errors and spend more time developing their writing.Many teachers consider themselves digital immigrants who struggle to keep up with student digital natives. Whether or not this dichotomy still holds true, in a 21st Century context of teaching and learning, is debatable not least of all because of the exponential development of apps and mobile learning technology. Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult for educators to know where to begin and for students to know how best to use it to advance their studies and improve their writing. Focusing on university students at a pre-university English as Second Language (ESL) program in Dubai, this paper discusses how mobile learning and the use of a range of apps can foster peer and self-editing, aid noticing and enhance ownership of the writing process. It is argued that flipping corrective feedback helps students to notice their errors and spend more time developing their writing.