Does Postdigital Critical Pedagogy Need Humanization?

• In Event: Critical Pedagogy in the Age of AI: Education, Power, and Politics of New Technologies

Abstract

Although scholars working in the tradition of critical technology studies may differ on their interpretations of what the term “postdigital” signals, broadly speaking, the postdigital turn can be understood as our modern human condition of ontological and epistemic entanglement with digital technologies. In Nicholas Negroponte’s “Beyond Digital,” he notes, “technology is already beginning to be taken for granted and its connotation will become tomorrow’s commercial and cultural compost for new ideas. Like air and drinking water, being digital will only be noticed by its absence, not its presence.” From this perspective, as Petar Jandric and Sarah Hayes explain, “the postdigital perspective…considers the digital “revolution” as something that has already happened and focuses to its reconfiguration.”

Although the postdigital paradigm helpfully characterizes the contemporary cyborgian
biodigital ecosystem in which we find ourselves, it raises important challenges for the tradition of critical pedagogy. As uncannily lively machines emerge amongst humans, animals, and the more-than-human world introducing novel forms of power and agency while blurring the lines between humans and machines, some scholars argue that critical pedagogy restricts our modes of analysis and is insufficient in its current state to account for our evolving socio-digital landscape. Indeed, as Jandric and Hayes note, “[t]hese days the ethos of critical pedagogy needs to be reinvented and repurposed for this curious postdigital space of technology and biology, theory and practice, action and reaction, humanism and posthumanism, learning and unlearning.”

While the postdigital paradigm would suggest that the notion of, and focus on, humanization represents a “restrictive rationality” in our brave new world of comingling between humans and machines, this paper argues that while the contours of our thinking may need to shift, the project of humanization should remain a vital component of a postdigital critical pedagogy. At the same time that we are witnessing the unleashing of algorithmic agencies, we continue to observe the dehumanization of human populations domestically and abroad (e.g. the Israeli bombardment of Gaza powered by artificial intelligence, discourses surrounding the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the repatriation of women’s bodies into the oppressively patriarchal state with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and repeated suggestions by vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance that women are machines for reproduction ). Additionally, discourses surrounding artificial intelligence and machine agency significantly obscure the human labor and exploitation required to sustain it. While we can and should shed the taxonomic baggage associated with the category of “human” and our assumptions regarding the superiority of human intelligence, this paper makes the case for the continued relevancy of humanization for a postdigital critical pedagogy.

Author

• Morgan Anderson, University of Northern Iowa