Postdigital-Biodigital: An Emerging Reality

We are increasingly no longer in a world where digital technology and media are separate, virtual, 'other' to a 'natural' human and social life. The postdigital is hard to define; messy; unpredictable; digital and analogue; technological and non-technological; biological and informational.

A presentation with three parts

Based on the author’s work as Editor-in-Chief of Postdigital Science and Education journal and book series (see Jandrić et al. 2018), the first part of the presentation introduces the development of the contemporary concept of the postdigital.

Based on the recently co-edited book Bioinformational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies (Peters et al. 2022), the second part of the presentation presents scholarly research defining new postdigital-biodigital knowledge ecologies.

Based on another recently co-edited book, Postdigital Ecopedagogies: Genealogies, Contradictions, and Possible Futures (Jandrić and Ford 2022), the third part of the presentation discusses postdigital-biodigital ecopedagogies as forms of educational innovation and critique that emerge from, negotiate, debate, produce, resist, and/or overcome the shifting and expansive postdigital ecosystems of humans, machines, nonhuman animals, objects, stuff, and other forms of matter.

References

Jandrić, P., & Ford, D. R. (Eds.). (2022). Postdigital Ecopedagogies: Genealogies, Contradictions, and Possible Futures. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97262-2.

Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital Science and Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893-899. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000.

Peters, M. A., Jandrić, P., & Hayes, S. (Eds.). (2022). Bioinformational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95006-4.

Bio on Professor Petar Jandrić

Petar Jandrić is a Professor at the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Croatia. His previous academic affiliations include Croatian Academic and Research Network, National e-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh, Glasgow School of Art, and Cass School of Education at the University of East London. He is Editor-in-Chief of Postdigital Science and Education journal, book series, and encyclopaedia. Personal website: http://petarjandric.com/.

The postdigital is both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation. In our postdigital condition, the 20th century focus on machinery needs to be replaced, at least partially, by a focus on a better understanding of living systems and their interactions with technology at all scales – from viruses, through human beings, to Earth’s ecosystem. Today’s curious bioinformational mix of blurred and messy relationships between physics and biology, old and new media, humanism and posthumanism, knowledge capitalism and bio-informational capitalism defines the postdigital condition and creates new knowledge ecologies. New knowledge ecologies require new pedagogies. Postdigital ecopedagogies name a condition, a question, and a call for experimentation to link pedagogical research and practice to challenges of our moment. They pose living, breathing, expanding, contracting, fluid, and spatial conditions and questions of our non-chronological present.