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In this paper, we report on creative- and arts-based sexual violence and bystander intervention workshops we developed and researched in England, Ireland, and Canada, through evaluation surveys, observations, and focus group interviews with nearly 1200 young people (aged 13–18). Whist the young people generally reported benefitting from the intervention, in the context of increasing use of digital technologies amongst youth, we explore the context-specific challenges they faced in learning about and being supported through bystander strategies across a wide range of diverse school spaces. We use the term postdigital bystanding to explicitly explore how teen's digital networks are often connected to the school-based 'real life' peer group, in ways that complicate clear distinctions between online and offline, arguing that these postdigital dynamics have not yet been adequately considered in bystanding interventions. We analyse how the intersectional community, cultural, and identity-specific factors in particular schooling environments shape responses to bystanding in postdigital environments, including how factors of sexism, defensive masculinity, elitism, racism, and a reluctance to report digital issues played out in the responses to the workshops. Finally, following young people's suggestions, we recommend that schools need to cultivate better safety and support strategies for youth in order to make postdigital bystander interventions more responsive and therefore effective in challenging and preventing sexual violence in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research offers a novel hauntological perspective to examine the evolving nature of complex learning spaces in higher education. In times of change and disruption, we draw on Derrida's concept of hauntology – which posits that the past and future 'haunt' the present – to analyse educational experiences. Our study comprises eighteen focus groups and seven individual interviews with students and educators at a large metropolitan university business school. Collaborative and abductive coding reveals critical insights into participants' perceptions of absence and presence in their experience of traversing learning spaces. Three key themes emerge: what we bring to, how we traverse, and what we are missing from higher education. The findings advocate for more fluid, adaptive approaches that balance educator and student agency while acknowledging inherent uncertainties. By highlighting the temporal dimensions shaping learning spaces, this research proposes more nuanced and responsive educational design, within and beyond the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial fluency describes the ability and confidence of an individual to navigate and negotiate their experiences in a postdigital world. This paper reflects on teaching and learning experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and its aftermath, and on the volatile nature of social media, and the threats and opportunities afforded by AI. It argues that having digital skills and knowledge is not sufficient for educators, students or graduates to deal with challenging situations and opportunities in a volatile world of ubiquitous and pervasive media. Instead, spatial fluency establishes a multimodal framing for considering learning spaces, tools, and media and their configuration as productive environments. People need to be critical, creative and confident users of physical and digital spaces, tools and media, understanding them holistically as interconnected spaces. Active learning strategies can help students to navigate, negotiate, and enhance their experiences of multimodal spaces and develop their fluency through diverse practices. Several vignettes are presented that situate spatial fluency in terms of learner agency, spatial affordances, wayfinding and desire paths, and formalities. It is argued that spatial fluency, therefore, provides teachers, students and organisations with an alternative to deficit discourses centred on skills. At its core is developing a person's agency to critically analyse the postdigital environment and its spatial affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we share interim insights that emerged from Female Voices in the Third Space: Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in South–North Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), a project co-funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust. Drawing on data generated through interviews conducted with female participants across universities in four different continents, we reviewed the relevance and appropriateness of named values and capitals we previously presented in a model of South–North COIL. Using a three-phase hybrid concept analysis methodology (theory, fieldwork and analysis), we discuss how student female voices have articulated attributes of their engagement in COIL to further explicate the relevance of the values and capitals identified and emerging. Our analysis pushes beyond normative and universal conceptualisations of learning spaces in HE in relation to the potential of COIL as a postdigital Third Space as (1) connected (providing inclusive and adaptive environments in which learning can take place), (2) embodied (shaped by the physical and virtual (inter)actions of individuals and groups), (3) relational (as realised through meaningful (inter)relationships that foster mattering, belonging, wellbeing, and community, amidst different cultures and contexts), and (4) (socio)material (as mutually shaped by technology and contexts which are mediated by educators and learners). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract How young people interpret and engage with nature is an important consideration within our current biodiversity and climate crises. What remains less clear are the ways in which online, networked, spaces underpin young people's relationships with nature, and what consequences these spaces may have for in‐person nature interactions. Given the ubiquitousness of networked spaces in society, it has been argued that day‐to‐day life is increasingly ‘postdigital’, in that we may no longer distinguish meaningful differences between our online and offline worlds. Therefore, it is necessary to examine this collapsing physical‐digital binary in the context of young people's in‐person interactions with nature to examine the effectiveness of this theoretical perspective. Utilising ethnographically situated, participant‐as‐observer methods, this qualitative multiple case study generated data across three rural residential outdoor education centres in England, Scotland and Wales, with young people aged 12–17. Participants were visiting the residential centres from urban schools in England and Scotland, with each group spending 5 days at their respective centre. Reflexive thematic analysis of fieldnote data revealed that young people had previously constructed their understandings and interpretations of what nature ‘is’ through networked environments such as Instagram, TikTok and Minecraft. These networked constructions often contextualised young people's direct, in‐person interactions with nature and demonstrated ways in which these online spaces influenced how nature was perceived and understood. The case is presented for interpreting the findings from a postdigital ‘networked baselines’ perspective. The findings will resonate with practitioners and policymakers concerned with the relationships between young people, networked spaces and nature connectedness. Alongside this, given the editorial discussion on the impacts of ‘nature on screen’ from Silk et al. (2021) in People and Nature, this paper provides a set of empirical findings on how young people's organic engagements with nature on‐screen provided a degree of foundational knowledge about what nature is, what nature is for and how nature should be engaged with. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

New sociomaterial and performative directions in literacy research on digital technologies and play in early childhoods may complicate the established concept of digital play. This study contributes to this line of research by empirically expanding on the concept of the postdigital. In the study, postdigital refers to how both "digital" and "non-digital" agentic materialities are allowed to act messily in contemporary early childhood play, unsettling the notion of the digital as a discrete category. By analyzing a case of two five-year-old children playing Minecraft with wooden and synthetic blocks in a preschool common room within an agential realist framework, we find that a postdigital play practice is performed through playful, sociomaterial configurations of "joining," "building," and "not running out of things." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facilitated by the sixth author, this roundtable was conducted on 24 January 2024, at Coventry University. It brings together members of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, from the centre’s five core research strands: Postpublishing; Postdigital Intimacies; ArtSpaceCity; Ludic Design; and AI and Algorithmic Cultures. Here we explore the multifaceted and interdisciplinary meaning to us of the concept of the ‘postdigital’ and unpack the salient characteristics that make it an important concept in future practice-research-theory.

This article argues that a sceptical attitude towards the role of digital technology in contemporary life is becoming increasingly prevalent in twenty-first-century fiction and offers a new way of theorising this thematic trend via refining the concept of the ‘postdigital’. Proving a critical overview of the way that the ‘postdigital’ has been interpreted in aesthetics, critical theory, and literary criticism, I show how the scepticism towards digital media that is a tenet of postdigital visual arts can now also be seen in some narrative fiction of the twenty-first century written in English. I thus show how what I define as postdigital fiction interrogates the way in which the digital and nondigital have become hybridised in digitised societies and questions the universal benefits digital media bring. Taking examples from print and digital fiction, I show how a postdigital perspective can manifest both thematically and aesthetically in fiction and argue that there is an increasing prevalence of postdigital ethics in narrative fiction across media.

Digital fiction can already boast a relatively long history. From the first text generators to hypertexts to multimodal and multimedia works, this genre of literature has always thrived on the latest technological innovations. The turn of 2015 and 2016 saw the release of three novels in the form of mobile device applications that might be recognized with the benefit of hindsight as paving the way for a new distinct genre of digital fiction. In the following article, I discuss The Pickle Index by Eli Horowitz, Arcadia by Iain Pears, and Belgravia by Julian Fellowes as examples of ‘app fiction’ and explore their generically formative features in the context of so-called ‘postdigital culture.’ These features will subsequently be used to argue that app fiction displays a postdigital dimension that corresponds to more general cultural phenomena within the digital domain in the second decade of the 21st century.

The multimodal writer does not simply write a poem or piece of fiction, but also architects a dynamic, ludic space in order to ‘publish’ the piece. This article examines the literature associated with “literary-ludic hybridity” (Ensslin 32–33) whilst also offering critical reflections on my own playful experiments in digital writing, namely in the creation of Viole(n)t Existence. This process of autoethnographic evaluation revealed that some of the precise writing challenges faced by multimodal, literary-ludic writers were not examined as closely as those of ‘traditional’ print writers. Whilst Barnard (2017) acknowledges that both hardware and software date quickly and multimodal writers must be invested in new innovations, the implications are not fully elucidated. The realities are that this hardware and software can change even before the creative piece is finished. From my own experience, the creative process evolved to be far more complex than that captured by the terms ‘drafting’ or ‘editing.’ It involved producing and assessing a collection of iterations which move between digital and physical spaces, and blur digital, personal and cultural bodies, whilst trying desperately, ultimately phantasmorgorically, to move towards an ever elusive ‘final’ piece. This form of writing practice demonstrates Alexenberg’s (10) understanding of the postdigital. Postdigital ludic writers must engage in many playful, creative experiments, thus simultaneously creating postdigital, posthuman archives, which are all in constant metamorphosis.

Contemporary augmented spaces are situated in-between digital-analog, material-immaterial, online-offline, and real-virtual binaries. Relatedly, postdigital as a concept suggests that digital technologies are now integrated with almost all aspects of the individual and social atmosphere. Therefore, we should engage digitality through a critical approach by focusing on its intermingled situation. For this reason, reading augmented spaces with a postdigital perspective is essential to understanding and evaluating the potential of digital technologies in the context of the current line of vision. This paper aims to provide a better understanding of contemporary debates on digital technologies in the context of design. For this purpose, the article briefly reviews the definition of augmented space, and later postdigital as a concept is discussed with its fundamental characteristics. In what follows selected projects amongst the 2023 Media Architecture Biennale finalists are studied concerning the postdigital augmented spaces. As an outcome of this research, we suggest a conceptual framework that can be effective for the theory and practice of postdigital augmented spaces.

The freshmen of the engineering curriculum are trained in the engineering drawing skill set which includes the generation of orthographic projections of any given component. When these freshmen are promoted to the next subsequent academic year, they are ready to learn the generation of three-dimensional computer-aided drawing (CAD) geometric models from the given orthographic projections. In today's postdigital era, the challenges and issues faced by these sophomores in generation of spatially visualized CAD geometric model is discussed in this work. A perceptive visual image of stop valve in a CAD-based environment is formulated, as the stop valves play a major role in product as well as process-oriented industries. The impediments faced by students in generating the spatially visualized CAD geometric model in the postdigital era have been discussed and deliberated at a stretch. Students' performance assessment before imparting training versus after imparting training in CAD-based geometric modeling skills by employing perceptive visual imagery method is recorded in this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The move to digital, and now hybrid, education has defamiliarised teaching practices and unsettled experiences of what it means to be and to engage at university. In this article, I examine what new questions evolving teaching and learning practices provoke with regards rethinking notions of the body, and concepts of presence and absence. Interweaving theories of performativity, of strangeness, and of agency as a cutting together/apart, I explore a specific example of online course design, a Small Private Online Course. I consider the dispersed and fragmented subjects and bodies that evade enclosure within the course, and the ontological implications for thinking about how subjects, bodies and materialities are cut, performed and made strange: what it means to 'be online'. I suggest that such a rethinking is necessary if we are to meaningfully conceptualise engagement, and to move beyond limited, but durable, assumptions that pervade contemporary discussions around digital learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo explora la situación del sujeto observador en el entorno tecnológico de la década de 2010 y comienzos de la de 2020. El marco teórico se basa, por un lado, en el énfasis que la filosofía de la imagen y los estudios visuales llevan largo tiempo haciendo acerca de la centralidad de lo visual en la problemática filosófica actual. Por otro lado, se puede constatar en los últimos años un incremento de la literatura académica acerca de lo postdigital que subraya la integración de la tecnología en la vida ordinaria. De acuerdo con este planteamiento, esta investigación interroga al sujeto observador del tiempo presente entendiéndolo como un agente visual que utiliza toda clase de tecnologías en múltiples contextos de la vida cotidiana. Para delinear la fisionomía de ese agente visual se comentarán prácticas que involucran desarrollos tecnológicos de gran relevancia en la actualidad partiendo de tres verbos con una larga tradición en el ámbito de la estética filosófica: reconocer, describir y jugar.

This reflection provides an introduction to, and reflection on, the new text Rethinking Problem-based Learning for the Digital Age (Savin-Baden and Fraser, 2024). It begins by telling the story and rationale for the creation of the book and then provides an overview of the text of the whole. The next section discusses the purpose of the book, and the final section analyses the importance of the notion of the postdigital for PBLonline. It argues that the postdigital as a concept and an approach is important in PBLonline because it prompts a rethinking of learning and the impact of neoliberalism of the university worldwide.

This article explores the relevance of the figure and identity model of the cyborg for Intermedial Comparatism. An overview of associated problems amenable to analysis is offered, together with a transmedial corpus of cultural texts related to science fiction and cyberpunk, selected for their canonical value in each medium under consideration. Comparative Literature has always been a discipline of frontiers, addressing literary phenomena that transcend national literatures and languages, based on the mobility of themes, texts, genres, forms and authors. Subsequently, it has attended to the intersections of the literary with other cultural discourses, especially the visual arts. In the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, already in the so-called post-digital culture, Intermedial Comparatism has been consolidated as a version of Comparative Literature that shifts the centrality of the categories of language and text towards that of medium, considering intermediality, remediation and transmediality as central cultural concepts and practices. In 2024, the first year after the explosion of generative AI in the media system and global postdigital culture, the potential of a myth that becomes a central theoretical category for studying the relationship between culture (literature) and technology is reactivated: the cyborg, a being on the border between the organic and the artificial.

The aim of this article is to highlight critical perspectives within the varied literature on the postdigital regarding notions of rationality and irrationality in the so--called digital age. By examining some of the most significant studies in this field, it is possible to identify a notable discontent towards what can be termed "binary rationality" -- a conception of rationality that elevates the digital model to a universal standard. This perspective not only classifies anything that exceeds this coding capacity as "irrational", but also equates digital technologies with progress. Conversely, the critical approach inherent in the postdigital perspective seeks to expose this identification as a form of dogmatism or ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effectiveness of existing conceptions of digital citizenship education (DCE) to address the challenges and issues of postdigital societies. Current conceptions of DCE aim to develop learners who are capable of using digital technologies to their advantage or for the betterment of society. However, existing DCE approaches do not fully acknowledge the relational space between humans and digital technologies. Applying postdigital theory to DCE forefronts sociotechnical relations and the issues citizens face in postdigital societies. Using the Aotearoa New Zealand context as an example, digital citizenship policies and guidelines are unpacked to reveal the shortcomings of the guidance schools and teachers are offered. The analysis suggests ways to update current DCE approaches to reflect the realities of citizenship in continuously developing, complex postdigital societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]