‘Choice Is Yours’: Anatomy of a Lesson Plan from University V

Abstract

This chapter aims to explore education as posthuman practice via the anatomy of a lesson plan. The lesson is narrated through the methodological device of speculative fiction. It is a fabulation set in the future but with roots that tangle with the past. Dark histories and futures are set to flicker here. Deception, de-identification and datafication lurk everywhere. If you are squeamish, you may wish to read no further. The datafication of people, their reduction to numbers, bytes and, most fatally of all, words, is laid out here in gory detail. If you do wish to read on, however, then you need nothing: just come as you are, and be assured as always that as the reader, choice is yours.

Books (Are Not Like People): A Postdigital Fable

“…Professor A would seem to be an able-bodied woman. As to her race see the previous chapter (Costello and Girme 2021) where she becomes embroiled in the University student until her gender and her body becomes his body and his skin. As the reader is beguiled into thinking she is a woman in this tale just told, thus the story genders its protagonist, the affable scholar.…”

“…Hacking her own name, brutal as it sounded, was still the more plausible explanation. High Professors were well known for their physical augmentations, the mods that allowed them to see and hear us in such high fidelity, in ever greater pixel counts (Costello and Girme 2021). Those were standard human practices from the dawn of time: to sculpt flesh, pierce, paint and augment the body.…”

“…We use speculative fiction (Ross 2017) here, as a type of narrative enquiry (Clandinin and Rosiek 2019), drawn from a posthuman methodological scabbard, most appropriate for cleaving embodied and disembodied postdigital pedagogies (Bayne 2018;Lakind and Adsit-Morris 2018;Knox 2019) and for peering into the classrooms of the future (Selwyn et al 2020;Macgilchrist et al 2020;Costello et al 2020;Costello and Girme 2021;Cox 2021). Selwyn et al (2020) give a useful account of their approach to writing speculative fiction as research.…”

“…It heralded the dawn of books as material embodiments of ideas that could be fought over. Following this early manifestation of the written word, we travel to University V in the year 2054, a world where writing has been outlawed (Costello et al 2020;Costello and Girme, 2021). A scholar in this dystopian academy has stumbled upon student testimonies from a research study.…”