New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies

ISSN: 1523-9543

New literacies emerge and evolve apace as people from all walks of life engage with new technologies, shifting values and institutional change, and increasingly assume 'postmodern' orientations toward their everyday worlds. Despite many efforts to take account of such changes, educational institutions largely remain out of touch with the range of new ways of making and sharing meanings that increasingly mediate and shape the lives of the young people they teach and the futures they face. This series aims to explore some key dimensions of the changes occurring within social practices of literacy and the educational challenges they present, with a view to informing educational practice in helpful ways. It asks what are new literacies,how do they impact on life in schools, homes, communities, workplaces, sites of leisure, and other key settings of human cultural engagement, and what significance do new literacies have for how people learn and how they understand and construct knowledge? It aims to challenge established and 'official' ways of framing literacy, and to ask what it means for literacies to be powerful, effective, and enabling under current and foreseeable conditions. Collectively, the works in this series will help to reorient literacy debates and literacy education agendas.

120 publications

Childhood Studies

ISSN: 2379-934X

"For many years, the field of Childhood Studies has crossed disciplinary boundaries that include, but are not limited to, anthropology, art, education, history, humanities, and sociology by addressing diverse histories, cultures, forms of representation, and conceptualizations of «childhood». The publications in the Rethinking Childhood Series have supported this work by challenging the universalization of childhood and introducing reconceptualized, critical spaces from which increased social justice and possibilities are generated for those who are younger. This newly named Childhood Studies Series in the global 21st century is created to continue this focus on social justice for those who are younger, but also to broaden and further explore conceptualizations of privilege, justice, possibility, responsibility and activism. Authors are encouraged to consider «childhood» from within a context that would decenter human privilege and acknowledge environmental justice and the more-than-human Other, while continuing to research, act upon, and transform beliefs, public policy, societal institutions, and possibilities for ways of living/being in the world for all of us. Boundary crossings are of greater importance than ever as we live unprecedented technological change, violence against living beings that are not labeled human (through experimentation, industrialization, and medicine), plundering of the earth, and gaps between the privileged and the marginalized (whether rich/poor, human/nonhuman). Along with continued concerns related to social justice, equity, poverty, and diversity, some authors in the Childhood Studies Series will choose to think about, and ask questions like: What does it mean to be a younger human being within such a world? What are the values, education, and forms of care provided within this context; and can/how should these dispositions and practices be transformed? Can childhood studies, and the diverse forms of representation and practice associated with it, conceptualize and practice a more just world broadly, while avoiding utopian determinisms and continuing to remain critical and multiple? "

13 publications

Rethinking Education

Rethinking education has never been more important. While there are many examples of good, innovative practice in teaching and learning at all levels, the conventional education mindset has proved largely resistant to pedagogic or systemic change, remaining preoccupied with the delivery of standardised packages in a standardised fashion, relatively unresponsive to the diversity of learners’ experiences and inclinations as well as to the personal perspectives of individual teachers. The challenge of our times in relation to education is to help transform that mindset. This series takes up this challenge. It re-examines perennial major issues in education and opens up new ones. It includes, but is not confined to, pedagogies for transforming the learning experience, any-time-any-place learning, new collaborative technologies, fresh understandings of the roles of teachers, schools and other educational institutions, providing for different learning styles and for students with special needs, and adapting to changing needs in a changing environment.

12 publications

Post-Anthropocentric Inquiry

In recent years, critical researchers, educators, and activists have become aware of the problems and limitations that have resulted by placing the ‘human’ at the center of all societal conceptualizations, concerns, and practices. Across fields, ranging from medical research laboratory practices—to the construction of the humanities—to the social sciences—to environmental studies (just to name a few), this anthropocentric focus is being called to question. The goal of this book series is to provide scholars and readers with critical opportunities to contest this anthropocentrism, (1) by creating a textual field of Post-Anthropocentric Inquiry that generates critical spaces for (re)thinking philosophies, knowledges, and ways of being/living and performing, as well as methodologies and inquiries, that decenter the human, (2) while at the same time attempting always/already to actively transform inequities and injustices performed by human privilege on nonhuman others, traditionally disqualified human others, and the natural world more broadly. This Post-Anthropocentric Inquiry can represent difference and the multiple, while at the same time exploring and welcoming notions of indistinction. Work that further develops and expands current notions of becoming (animal, earth), new feminist materialisms, critical posthuman sensibilities, hybrid existences (past and present) are example locations from which an intersectional, non-anthropocentric politics may emerge. Additionally, post-anthropocentric inquiry and activism will always include the unthought, not-yet-considered modes of living, thinking, research while critically acknowledging that alternatives can create new dualisms, new forms of human privilege, and are not always liberatory for those labeled not human or for those human beings who have traditionally been marginalized. Further, post-anthropocentric scholarship acknowledges, and attempts to (1) transform, the current post-anthropocentric predicament that facilitates neoliberal capitalism as all forms of life, matter, and relations have been/are constructed to serve market economies, and (2) examine the unprecedented human/nonhuman interaction with the increasingly intrusive and intimate technological order. Post-anthropocentric inquiry is necessary as related to these contemporary aggressive, and all-encompassing post-human conditions. Single or multiple authored manuscripts are encouraged that facilitate the development of Post-Anthropocentric Inquiry by addressing one issue, multiple issues, research purposes, methodologies, and/or forms of activism. Over a wide range of volumes that cross disciplines, the series will address broad issues, as mentioned above, and questions like the following: What is post-anthropocentric inquiry? What is made possible, enabled by post-anthropocentric approaches and research methodologies? How is post-anthropocentric research conducted without (re)privileging the human? How does the work in fields that would decenter the human, like critical animal studies, intersect with professional content and practices in fields like education or medicine? How can coalitions be formed (and actions taken) that decenter the human and increase possibilities for all forms of justice, while countering capitalist and technological orders that devalue all forms of life? Interested authors should contact Gaile S. Cannella, gaile.cannella@gmail.com

2 publications

Digital Learning and the Future

ISSN: 2634-8527

This interdisciplinary book series examines the use of digital technology in education. It is part of an unfolding educational agenda around technology-enhanced learning, where technology is both blended as a tool within existing pedagogies and drives new pedagogies. The series looks to the future, to emerging technologies and methodologies. Areas of interest include educational futures and future pedagogies, pedagogy and globalization (including MOOC), mobile learning, edtech, technology in assessment, the use of AI in education, and technology and face-to-face blended learning. The series encourages proposals for short-format books (between 25,000 and 50,000 words) with the aim of responding quickly to this rapidly changing field. Short monographs, co-authored or edited collections, case studies, practical guides and more are also all welcome.

1 publications