Out now: our book exploring postdigital spaces for learning

Postdigital Learning Spaces : Towards Convivial, Equitable and Sustainable Spaces for Learning. Published by Springer as part of the Postdigital Science and Education series. 
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A little under two years ago, Lucila Carvalho and I started to work-up plans for an edited collection to build upon the momentum created by our Special Issue (with Michael Gallagher and Jeremy Knox) around the Postdigital Learning Spaces of Higher Education (Lamb et al. 2022). 

With our edited collection, Lucila and I were keen to explore how some of central ideas of postdigital thinking were playing-out in learning spaces beyond traditional and tech-privileged university classrooms. And we wanted this to be done in ways that might share or propose ways of nurturing learning spaces that can be convivial, equitable or sustainable. At the same time, with a view to generating original perspectives and critiques, we wanted to work with researchers and practitioners who were not already immersed in the postdigital field.

The different authors we invited to contribute to the project have really delivered on our hopes for the book, as it is contextually, geographically and methodologically diverse (and beyond that, also a great read, as Petar Jandrić notes in his Series Editor’s Preface). As we signal in our Introduction, reading the collection from cover-to-cover involves taking a critical journey that begins in sub-Saharan Africa, before following a path that ventures into the Peruvian Andes and the Swiss Alps, winds its way through the streets of Sao Paulo and central Edinburgh, and stops off in, among other places, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand. Along the way there’s an opportunity to watch the affective play of children in museums and playgrounds, to visit an exhibition where migrant perspectives are shared through postdigital media, and to observe students in conversation in the outdoor classroom.

There are learning excursions through the postdigital city and aboard the transcontinental train journey, and insights into learning spaces associated with Long-Covid, and in workshops where connections are made with plants, trees and the natural world. Beyond that, we tune-into the ways that writing spaces can be shaped by music, and we use author-generated photographs as a way of explaining some of the postdigital assumptions that are most useful in helping us to understand spaces for learning.

This isn’t a complete list of the studies and stories presented across our collection, or indeed what Lucila and I feel they collectively have to say about how we might nurture positive postdigital spaces for learning - you'll need to see the book for that! Hopefully, though, you'll have a feel for the book and might want to explore further.