Digital Decolonization: A Critical Pedagogical Intervention

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Issues in Culture, Curriculum, and Justice

Abstract

This theoretical essay argues for a critical pedagogy that focuses on developing students’ resilient and adaptive responses to the toxic aspects of the digital attention economy. Educational psychologists and developmentalists have identified the negative impact of these digital technologies on youth. Technologists have shown how technologies were specifically designed to produce addiction and then profits (Harris, 2016; Lanier 2010, 2014, 2018). By modifying behavior in order to control and then exploit it for material gain, these technologies constitute fertile terrain for critical pedagogy (Freire, 1976; Giroux, 2010). I utilize conjunctional analysis to outline learning goals for teaching young people about cultural resistance in ways that, while entirely future-worldmaking, are nonetheless rooted in abolitionist and anti-colonial movements of the last century.

Author

• Janine de Novais, University of Delaware