I’m delighted to share that I’m now have the additional role of Reader in Postdigital Education at the University of the Arts London.
This is a teaching career Readership which I became eligible for because of a shift towards what REF 2029 calls “New Insights, Effectively Shared”. Thanks to Trevor Keeble for taking UAL in this progressive direction and Silke Lang and Mark Ingham for designing the criteria and supporting the application process. Thanks also to Ian Truelove for being an excellent sounding board and to Susan Orr for years of support.
Reader in Postdigital Education is an achingly academic title so I feel I should explain.
The Reader part essentially means ‘UK associate-professor’. The strict interpretation of the term, I assume, is that I’m reading my field before I go out and start professing about it. In practice, I do a lot of ‘professing’ via my blog and speaking invites. I will use the new role to build on this and develop various research outputs.
The ‘Postdigital’ part is in the ‘post’ family of Postmodern and Post-punk. As in, it is not implying that the digital is finished, but rather that it does not exist in isolation. Using ‘post’ as a prefix is troublesome but in a positive way it is exactly that trouble which I want to stay with. A good way of putting it is as:
“…a term that sucks but is useful.” (Cramer, 2015, p. 13).
Postdigital describes an approach or method rather than a state which makes it a useful framing for research into emerging phenomenon.
Starting in the arts then moving to education
Fittingly, Postdigital as a concept has roots in creative practice, an early use describing the generation of music from the glitches, or failures, of digital technology (Cascone, 2000), but since then the term has evolved and become a field of research in its own right. The Journal of Postdigital Science and Education being a key location.
More specifically, in an educational context the Postdigital highlights that:
“…contemporary student practices with technology are complex entanglements between physical and digital technologies, spaces, activities, and time.” (Jandric, et al, 2018).
This framing is useful in countering the cultural/commercial habit of implying ‘digital’ is always ‘new’ and ‘future’. It uncovers ‘inevitable’ digital futures as commonly a vehicle for standard models of capital and power.
The 52group (Postdigital and education from way back)
I’ve been thinking Postdigitally since 2009 when myself, Ian Truelove, Lawrie Phipps and Richard Hall (The mysteriously named ‘52group’) met and co-opted the term for online/networked education.
Our use of the term built on the idea that the digital, especially the internet, was already woven into almost all aspects of life and learning. This was quite a bold claim just three years after Facebook has been launched for the general public but we were becoming impatient with an obsession in digital education with every new technology that came along.
It’s difficult to recall now, but at that time there was a feeling that the Web was a novel frontier which was free from the baggage and politics of our stuffy old institutions. We hadn’t yet understood the extent to which our data was becoming commercially valuable. In education there was a somewhat uncritical obsession with technological innovation and how this could be applied in teaching and learning.
Our 2009 provocation, “Preparing for the postdigital era” now reads like an early call to be more human-centred and weary of the tech gurus:
“Postdigital aims to throw off the yoke of digital dogma, where the language of a perceived digital elite drives not only development, but also skews innovation, where innovation is only seen as being that associated with the “latest” technology… …Innovation in a postdigital era is more effectively articulated as being associated with the human condition and the aspiration toward new or enhanced connectedness with others.” (52group, 2009)
What has changed since then is a broad cultural shift from a largely unquestioning acceptance of the convenience being sold via the digital to a position of scepticism and, in some cases, fear as each new ‘revolution’ is presented as inevitable. That is not to say that we don’t use the ‘revolutionary’ solutions, use continues to increase, but now with a suspicion that the overall direction of travel will benefit the providers of the technology more than us.
The Postdigital era really did arrive. It’s complex, messy and requires serious thought.
52group.(2009). Preparing for the postdigital era http://docs.google.com/View?id=aqv2zmc9bgm_51ft65rbn2 accessed August 14th 2026.
Cascone, K. (2000). The aesthetics of failure: ‘post-digital’ tendencies in contemporary computer music. Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 12–18.
Cramer, F. (2015). What is ‘post-digital’? In D. M. Berry & M. Dieter (Eds.), Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computation and design (pp. 12–26). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Petar Jandrić , Jeremy Knox, Tina Besley, Thomas Ryberg, Juha Suoranta & Sarah Hayes (2018) Postdigital science and education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50:10, 893-899, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000