Postdigital education in a biotech future

Abstract

This paper explores a possible future of postdigital education in 2050 using the means of social science fiction. The first part of the paper introduces the shift from 20th century primacy of physics to 21st century primacy of biology with an accent to new postdigital–biodigital reconfigurations and challenges in and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The second part of the paper presents a fictional speech at the graduation ceremony of a fictional military academy in a fictional East Asian country in 2050. This fictional world is marked by global warfare and militarization, and addressed graduates are the first generation of artificially evolved graduates in human history. The third part of the paper interprets the fictional narrative, contextualizes it into educational challenges of today, and argues for a dialogical, humanistic conception of new postdigital education in a biotech future.

Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures

“…Like many other critical education researchers in recent years, we are particularly interested in methods using fictional storytelling to imagine the future. We keep our definition of this method broad as noted above, but certainly, it overlaps or intersects with the methods of social science fiction (Jandrić and Hayes 2021 ; Selwyn et al 2020 ) and design fiction (Cox 2021 ). Drawing on an established body of work in the social science literature, Selwyn et al ( 2020 : 92) define social science fiction as the creation of stories ‘related to key themes and ideas from contemporary sociology and how they might play out in different local contexts and cultures’, with a focus on what does not yet exist.…”

“…The paper by Hillman et al ( 2020 : 13) also has multiple short fictions, which the authors do identify as scenarios, but as these scenarios unfold across three decades and feature a number of characters, they come together to create a not overly hopeful story of the future. Finally, Jandrić and Hayes ( 2021 : 3) suggest their fiction is ‘neither utopian nor dystopian; it simply presents one possible future which [they] find interesting for analysis’. As our analysis is focused on themes of hopeful and pessimistic futures, we read this paper through that lens, rather than through consideration of its relationship to utopias and dystopias, but again note that this could be another way of analysing these types of fictions, and which would offer different insights into the type of things this kind of work is doing.…”

Who cares about learning design? Near future superheroes and villains of an educational ethics of care

“…Design fictions may be products such as the fictional CompellU online proctoring platform (Richard and Caines 2021) that explored surveillance and weaponization of the language of care and protection. They may be social science fictions (Suorota et al 2022) about imagined schools or universities (Cox 2021;Macgilchrist, Allert, and Bruch 2020;Jandrić and Hayes 2021;Costello et al 2020). Methodologically, the trustworthiness of such accounts may be whether these studies 'may be read, and lived, vicariously by others' (Connelly and Clandinin 1990).…”

Rewild My Heart: With Pedagogies of Love, Kindness and the Sun and Moon

“…Speculative approaches are being increasingly used in a variety of ways in education (Costello et al 2020(Costello et al , 2022Kupferman 2022;Suoranta et al 2022). In academic literature, they may comprise science fictions of teachers with built-in obsolescence (Jandrić and Hayes 2021), classrooms from the future (Selwyn et al 2020), explorations of AI educational futures (Cox 2021) and medical education futures where struggling medical schools offer perks of 'comfort animals' (Cifu et al 2021).…”