Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Theoretical Sketch

• In Event: Toward More Just Futures: Media and/as/for Social Justice

Abstract

This essay employs conjunctural analysis, as conceptualized by Stuart Hall (1980, 1996), to create a theoretical sketch of what I call critical digital pedagogy. Conjunctural analysis integrates sustains a productive tension between the distinctiveness of a cultural moment (the way it feels and is unprecedented), and its continuity with the past (the way it is nonetheless in continuity with precedents in the past). According to Hall (2012), by holding both continuity and discontinuity simultaneously, conjunctural analysis keeps us "thinking forwards," about intervention and disruption (Hall, 2012). In that spirit, this essay thinks forward, toward a critical digital pedagogy premised on intervening on the digital colonization that currently fuels surveillance capitalism at a great human cost.

Author

• Janine de Novais, University of Delaware