*CFP* "DIGITAL PEDAGOGIES POST-COVID-19", SPECIAL ISSUE, CONVERGENCE JOURNAL

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced academe to rethink the role digital and internet technologies play in and with the pedagogical process. For better or worse, the internet as institution has disrupted classical and traditional notions of learning. As evidenced by the pandemic, we are all falling behind in this paradigmatic shift in pedagogical understanding and approach. According to some (Ulmer, 2003; Serres, 2015; Hayles, 2007), the exigency of such a reconsideration arrives as utterly overdue. While the otherwise future of online learning has already arrived, COVID-19 has demonstrated that we are still yet living in the past.

Understanding our era as an apparatus or paradigm (Ulmer 1998)—at least with regard to digital technologies in general, the internet in particular—we must give attention to emerging patterns of activity, belief, logic, and even neurology. While some theorists have warned about the danger of digital technologies causing disorientation (Stiegler, 2008), the soul at work (Berardi, 2009), violence (Virilio, 1986), or general detriment (Carr, 2010), we should be reminded of the concept of appropriation, as given by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1987). Digital technologies are what we make of them, and this includes digital pedagogy. Digital pedagogy thus again returns us to the /pharmakon/: a poison, or a cure—or both. As such, the aim of education is to remedy the influence of digital media and immunize us against it, even if by way of digital education.

This special issue explores the potentials and dangers that digital technologies hold for pedagogy and education. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the “Zoomification” of teaching, we aim to reassess the key issues facing digital pedagogy today. Our interest lies in analyzing the significance of the generational shift in the modes of cognitive processing and behavioral patterning engendered by digital technologies (the internet, video games, augmented reality, virtual reality, etc.). We are especially interested in how digital pedagogy can be understood in terms of individual (in)capacities relative to the institutional and disciplinary context of education writ large. In short, this special issue seeks to “explicate the future [of pedagogy] implicated in the new technologies” (Serres, 2015). And new technologies seem to emerge with greater speed and velocity than our response and appropriation of them—especially with regard to pedagogy.

The editors welcome contributions from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives that explore questions regarding digital pedagogy, such as:

• What is the current and future role of digital pedagogy, including but not limited to augmented reality, virtual reality, haptic technologies, etc.? 
• What roles does emotion, affect, and embodiment play in “remote” or “virtual” online learning environments? 
• How can digital pedagogy be informed by feminist, critical race, post-colonial, and Marxist approaches to education? 
• How should digital pedagogies attend to what has been termed the “post-truth” condition (Fuller, 2020; McIntrye, 2018; Ball, 2017)? 
• How can the transition from orality to literacy help us understand the transitional state of our educational institutions and contribute to the invention of post-literate pedagogies? 
• How can we understand post-literacy, multi-modality, and electracy (Ulmer, 2003) in the necessary context of emergent digital technologies and pedagogies?

 

Deadline for abstracts: October 1, 2021

Please send a 500-word abstract and a 100-word bio to the guest editors: jmarkelj@gmail.com and ssndvall@memphis.edu. We would particularly welcome contributions from scholars based in the global south or whose research relates directly to those contexts.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to send full contributions by March 2022.