The postdigital learning spaces of higher education

It has never been more important to try and understand the complex and changing nature of educational spaces. At least in the UK context, the conditions surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic have had a profound effect on how we understand those settings where educational activity takes place. As campuses entered lockdown, learners, teachers and institutions have rapidly turned towards digital technologies and pedagogies that have helped to make it possible to attend classes from the couch, record lectures from the living room, and attend meetings anywhere we can find a moment of quiet amid the distractions of our ostensibly domestic home-settings. Our inability to easily spend time in the environs of the library, lab and lecture theatre has pushed us to more readily reflect upon those physical and networked settings where we teach, research, write and perform other parts of the university’s work.

With this in mind, I am glad to be working with Lucila Carvalho (Massey University), Michael Gallagher and Jeremy Knox (both University of Edinburgh like myself) on a Special Issue that explores this subject, for the Postdigital Science and Education journal. We are interested in collecting theoretical and empirically-driven papers that address, but are not limited to, the following themes: 

• accessibility, technology and space
• learning spaces on the periphery
• informal spaces for learning in higher education
• commercialisation and the neoliberalisation of learning space
• surveillance and university space 
• hybridity and transformation
• spaces beyond the campus
• learning space design and use 
• sound, technology and space
• learning space in a postdigital world

If you have something to say around any of these or related themes, we will be very glad to receive a​ 700-word abstract by 22 January 2021. As the point of contact for this Special Issue I will be happy to talk through possible submissions. In the short time since announcing the call for abstracts we have heard from researchers with some really interesting takes on the different themes, and it already feels like this Special Issue will make an important contribution to our understanding of the complex and changing nature of higher education learning spaces. Read the call for abstracts here.