Abolitionist Digital Literacies: Toward a Theory of the Digital Undercommons

• In Event: The Continuing and Renewed Urgency of Critical Digital Literacies: Ethical and Political Considerations on Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives & Theoretical Perspectives
As digital technologies have become increasingly ubiquitous in classrooms around the globe, so have narrow Silicon Valley imaginations around education developed and persisted, often intersecting with deficit-based and neoliberal approaches to the further detriment of already marginalized students (Author 4, 2021a). Compounding this trend, digital inequities around access to and quality of online learning have been highlighted and further entrenched in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an urgent need for alternate visions and speculative technological futures in education (Author 4, 2021b); as Ruha Benjamin (2017) reminds us, “remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” This paper surfaces such imaginaries through an analysis of the relationship between ideological orientation and design of digital pedagogies, comparing dominant school digital pedagogies with those in non-school activist contexts. From a disciplinary perspective, we operate at the intersection of digital literacies, learning sciences, and abolitionist praxis, drawing on spaces “beyond the beyond” (Moten & Harney, 2013).

Methods & Data Sources
We build on findings from several years of ethnographic research in school and out-of-school contexts in the western US and Southeast Asia. This paper focuses on recent participatory research consisting of online multimodal document analysis, virtual interviews, and participant observation with youth organizing movements, one in Central Java, Indonesia, and several in northern California. The data are part of a wide survey of edtech discourse and activist abolitionist pedagogies carried out over a span of 8 months with a team of undergraduates and doctoral students. After gathering and undertaking group analyses of organization Instagram pages, we engaged in participatory production of activist social media posts, exchanges of digital pedagogy strategies between groups, and in-depth interviews with prominent members, particularly those most involved with social media curation and intertwined pedagogical activities of various sorts. Analysis was iterative and ongoing, consisting of thematic coding, intensive research memoing, and team discussion surrounding the research questions.

Findings & Significance
Analysis resulted in a comparison of the sociotechnical imaginaries (Author, 2018; Jasanoff & Kim, 2009) of educational technologists (companies and district/school-level evangelists) with those of abolitionist groups and other activist groups following alternate models of digital pedagogies. Educational technologist discourse focused on universality and the erasure of difference, particularly around race, typically drawing on the (heavily coded) neoliberal language of school reform and edtech. The activist digital pedagogies, which we describe as the digital undercommons (Moten & Harney, 2013), were diverse, robust, and thoughtful, taking into account and engaging directly with the vast diversity of their participants. We see these abolitionist digital literacies as sources of cultural wealth, knowledge, and pedagogy that schools can learn from.

Author

• Roberto de Roock, University of California - Santa Cruz