HOPE AS A COLLECTIVE PRACTICE – AMID THE RUINS OF THIS PLANET

How can we be hopeful in the midst of the planetary justice crisis that we experience around us? This talk revisits the conference theme, exploring the contours of a networked pedagogy of hope. Hope can be seen as a psychological attribute and found on inspirational postcards. Hope can be affirmative and future-oriented, guiding ideals of learning and teaching. But thinkers such as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Corine Pelluchon and Jonathan Lear have also rooted hope in the destruction, racism, exploitation and cultural devastation created in the ruins of our damaged planet. This talk will situate examples of a pedagogy of hope in the midst of these ruins. Hope is not optimism. Hope is a collective practice that constantly fails, but also constantly creates alliances, shapes convivial technologies and enacts justice-oriented degrowth and rewilding. The talk reflects on the implications of this position for networked learning. It suggests that only when hope shows us the broken world can it also show us the moments of beauty amid the ruins.

About Professor Felicitas Macgilchrist

Felicitas Macgilchrist is a Professor of Digital Education and Schooling at the University of Oldenburg, Germany.

Her research explores the cultural politics of educational technology, with a focus on critical, ethnographic and speculative approaches. Felicitas is co-editor of Learning, Media and Technology and has recently written about designing postdigital futures in Postdigital Science and Education, rewilding edtech in education and generative criticality in Learning, Media and Technology. Following recent co-edited books including Postdigital Participation in Education (Palgrave, 2023), Schule und Unterricht im digitalen Wandel (Schools, Teaching and Digital Transformation) (Klinkhardt, 2023) and Die datafizierte Schule (The Datified School) (Springer, 2023), she is now thinking about how to centre design justice in edtech research and development.

If you want to learn more, please visit https://www.edu-digitalinequality.org/