Returning to critical pedagogy in a world of datafication

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a further extension of the sociotechnical logics of digital platforms to every realm of social life. Given the colonialist, oppressive and exploitative dynamics through which digital platforms work, several scholars supported the need to embrace an openly activist role to help individuals contrast the ways in which they are trapped in loops of dependency and trajectorism. Drawing on the results of 40 auto-ethnographic diaries, this paper showcases the usefulness of critical pedagogical techniques in enhancing critical awareness regarding hegemonic datafication structures, while also arguing that despite a good level of consciousness raising, it remains difficult for people to go beyond subalternity and make more concrete changes in personal and collective behaviors. We contend that to break persistent feelings of dependency, it is necessary to go further with a two-step process combining autoethnographic tools, aimed at increasing critical algorithmic awareness, with the development of data science skills that can help individuals acquiring more precise knowledge schemes and scaling down the power of giant corporations, thereby building individual and collective capacities to use data for developing counter-narratives about possible futures.

Algorithms and hegemony in the workplace: Negotiating design and values in an Italian television platform

“…As previously shown, hegemonic arrangements play a key role in this context. This implies that digital platforms are not only socio-technical artifacts that favour the development of hegemonic relationships among end users through everyday trivial practices (Markham, 2021; Pronzato and Markham, 2023), but also the product of hegemonic arrangements within corporate environments that structure the design process and contribute to embed viewpoints and objectives into those systems.…”

“…In the workplace, these processes are constrained and enabled by corporate hegemonic configurations, which are themselves reproduced by tech workers' actions, within the structure/agency cycle (Giddens, 1984). Then, once deployed, algorithmic models become social agents (Airoldi, 2022), continuously updateable by companies, which impose on end-users hegemonic relationships that are then reproduced by the same users through their everyday online activities (Markham, 2021;Pronzato and Markham, 2023).…”

A critical (theory) data literacy: tales from the field

“…Although the vocabularies of relevant critical theorists are not emphasized, such as Althusser’s “interpellation,” Lukacs’s “reification,” or Gramsci’s “hegemony,” these concepts are explored indirectly, by considering how an everyday user’s ideas about how the world works are built and reinforced through both repetition and neutralization. Gramsci (1937/1971) plays a central role in the pedagogical design, in that we are deeply concerned about hegemony, whereby over time, through consensual participation in these systems, a powerful loop of invisible control is reinforced that privileges corporatized and capitalist interests and retains control through consent that is buried in infrastructures, defaults, and everyday banal procedures of being social or accomplishing personal tasks through platforms (see also Pronzato and Markham, 2023).…”

Un futuro lejano pero inminente: imaginarios de periodistas costarricenses sobre la inteligencia artificial

“…Markham (2021) argumenta que el imaginario también tiene valor pedagógico. Como apuntan Pronzato y Markham (2023), "los objetivos de la pedagogía crítica deberían ser modos de auto-indagación que identifiquen y rompan esos marcos discursivos que restringen la posibilidad de imaginar futuros diferentes" (p. 110).…”