Mapping and Tracing the Postdigital: Approaches and Parameters of Postdigital Research

Abstract

The launch of Postdigital Science and Education helped generate a burst of new scholarship about this emerging turn in educational research and theory. Yet, what it means to do postdigital research remains obscure to many. Ongoing debates around definitions, combined with the complexity of analysing digital activity within rich contexts that are also social, material, political, economic, and so on, make it challenging to understand what constitutes postdigital research. Meanings of the postdigital emerge from within the processes of postdigital research. Furthermore, while some individual contributions to postdigital research may be grounded in particular disciplines, we argue that postdigital research, in general, benefits from transdisciplinary knowledge. All of this points to a need for flexibility, and principled, rather than prescriptive, research and scholarship practices. It situates postdigital research in the tradition of compositional and inventive research approaches, and this paper traces that relationship.