a painted sign on a wall that says question everything and smile

I haven’t yet listened to the episode of Neil Selwyn’s podcast entitled ‘What is ‘critical’ in critical studies of edtech? but I couldn’t resist reading the editorial written by Felicitas Macgilchrist in the open-access journal Learning, Technology and Society.

Macgilchrist argues that we shouldn’t take the word ‘critical’ for granted, and outlines three ways in which it can be considered. I particularly like her approach to critique of moving the conversation forward by “raising questions and troubling… previously held assumptions and convictions.”

Given what’s happening in the US at the moment, I’ve pulled out the Foucault quotation as making it difficult to be governed is absolutely how to resist authoritarianism — in any area of life.

When Latour (2004) wondered if critique had ‘run out of steam’, this led to a flurry of responses about critical scholarship today. If, he wrote, his neighbours now thoroughly debunk ‘facts’ as constructed, positioned and political, then what is his role as a critical scholar? Latour proposes in response that ‘the critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles’ (2004, 246). And, in this sense, ‘assembling’ joined proposals to see critical scholarship as ‘reparative’, rather than paranoid or suspicious (Sedgwick 1997), as ‘diffraction’, creating difference patterns that make a difference (Haraway 1997, 268) or as ‘worlding’, a post-colonial critical practice of creation (Wilson 2007, 210). These generative approaches have been picked up in research on learning, media and technology, for instance, analysing open knowledge practices (Stewart 2015) or equitable data practices (Macgilchrist 2019), and most explicitly in feminist perspectives on edtech (Eynon 2018; Henry, Oliver, and Winters 2019). […]

Generative forms of critique invite us to imagine other futures, and have inspired a range of speculative work on possible futures. Futurity becomes, in these studies, less about predicting the future or joining accelerationist or transhumanist futurisms, but about estranging readers from common-sense. SF ‘isn’t about the future’ (Le Guin [1976] 2019, xxi), it’s about the present, generating ‘a shocked renewal of our vision such that once again, and as though for the first time, we are able to perceive [our contemporary cultures’ and institutions’] historicity and their arbitrariness’ (Jameson 2005, 255). […]

If critique is not fault-finding or suspicion but, as one often cited source has it, the ‘art of not being governed like that and at that cost’ (Foucault 1997, 29; Butler 2001), then the critical work outlined here aims to identify how we are currently being governed, to question how this produces the acceptable or desirable horizons of ‘good education’, ‘good teaching’ or ‘good citizens’, and to speculate on alternatives.

Source: Learning, Media and Technology

Image: Marija Zaric