We are accelerating towards a higher education future where AI, dataveillance, and personalisation are de-humanising the educational experience within virtual learning environments (VLEs). These teaching machines risk driving higher education away from its social and subjective aims towards efficient ways to credential human capital (Watters, 2021). The social effects of technology upon education are emerging within critical studies of educational technology (Macgilchrist, 2021) that highlight unforeseen and emerging harms upon individuals (Selwyn, 2010). This postdigital education research agenda, articulated by Fawns et al. (2023),

invites scholars to interrogate issues of sociomaterial entanglement and human experience. Here, a knowledge gap exists in our ability to conceptualise how student subjectivities might be shaped by emergent VLEs (Castañeda & Williamson, 2021). This paper seeks to develop such concepts through post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2018) that thinks with Romantic literature and literary theory. 

 

Postdigital critique echoes the central tenets of Romanticism, which questioned the veneration of technology, efficiency, and logic in favour of social justice and the flourishing of individual subjectivity (Ferber, 2010). In this paper I imagine how the Romantics might describe experience in VLEs supported by scholars that analyse literary tropes to generate novel concepts of how subjectivities could be forged. The literary retorts of Shelley, Austen, and Wordsworth to the Enlightenment (Berlin, 2013) have much to teach us about the loss of agency in emergent educational worlds and the unforeseen consequences of rapid technological advancement (Beetham et al., 2022; Douglas, 2017; Thompson, 2022). For example, Trigg (2015) highlights how Jane Austen's depictions of codified behaviours are developed to explain how subjects navigate "socially restricted spaces" (p. 199) by narrowcasting emotion. This has much to offer towards understanding the powerful gaze of affect recognition software within VLEs and the performative resistance that might ensue (McStay, 2020; Sumner, 2021; Sumner & Martin, 2020). Alongside Shelley's (1996) depiction of a non-human ethnographer, we might also speculate upon how AI might calculate our human striving to become.

 

My inquiry seeks to capture the power of literature to provide "scaffolding for the narrative imagination" (Comer & Taggart, 2021, p. 199) and contribute to knowledge at the intersection of literary theory, surveillance, and education (Brighenti, 2009). Following Greene (1976), I seek to draw literature into the otherwise social-scientific paradigm of educational research to develop theories of subjectivity for a plausibly less human education future (Carlin, 2010; Pasquale & Selwyn, 2022).

In his novel Clarissa (1748-49), Samuel Richardson produces a model of friendship and human connection that depends upon the “necessary absence” of letter writing (6). In the increasingly restricted environment of the novel, Clarissa and her friend Anna perform their friendship through their letters, evoking their spaces of writing and reading to create a shared imagined space in which to foster intimacy and maintain their social connection. 270 years later, two separate but related groups of readers picked up Richardson’s novel, to share an experience of reading apart, together. From across the world, academics and literary enthusiasts shared their experiences of reading Clarissa via Twitter using #Clarissa2020 to chart their course through the novel, reading each letter on the date it is written in the novel. This endeavour began before the global outbreak of Covid-19 but took on new resonances when the pandemic caused those readers, like Clarissa herself, to be locked down. In the wake of the outbreak in May 2020 a reading group of academics in the US selected Clarissa as “the long, immersive novel for the moment” (Lynch), meeting over zoom to discuss the novel throughout the northern hemisphere summer of 2020. Twelve members of the reading group contributed to an issue of the online journal The Rambling, to reflect upon their shared experience of reading the novel in lockdown. This paper examines the ways in which these groups–#Clarissa2020 and the reading group Clarissa, in Lockdown, Together–share their experience of reading in virtual and digital spaces, collaboratively building an online community for human social connection during a time of absence and isolation. It argues that these digital spaces and virtual communities are built through the same methods deployed by Clarissa and Anna to maintain their friendship through their correspondence. Using the exchange of text (whether the letter, a tweet, a poem or an article) #Clarissa2020 and Clarissa, in Lockdown, Together evoke the affective experiences, physical places, and imagined spaces of their reading to remap and rearticulate the novel in the twenty-first century digital landscape. In doing so, they build, Like Clarissa and Anna, a new virtual and imagined space for human social connection.

Lynch, Deidre. “‘Nothing of Body:’ Our Clarissa Quarantine.” The Rambling, no. 11, June 2021, https://the-rambling.com/2021/06/11/issue11-lynch/.

Richardson, Samuel. Correspondence with Sarah Wescomb, Frances Grainger and Laetitia Pilkington. Edited by John A. Dussinger, Cambridge University Press, 2014. 

While artistic production in narrative forms such as film and television are often recognised as a collaborative process, prose writing remains focused on the idea of a transcendent, imaginative, individual author, locked away in their garret, producing a text ripe for dissemination via traditional publishing methods. In the meantime, the postmodern imagination, having lost sight of narrative as a source of ethical representation, traps itself inside pastiche and irony. Where, then, does the posthuman imagination lie? This paper presents ongoing research, by the three authors, into climate fiction and collaborative writing processes for prose fiction writers. New technologies, such as the collaborative whiteboard on Zoom, Google docs, or Etherpad, allow multiple writers to work on a document in real time, at the same time. These technologies have been utilised primarily in the corporate world, with the ability to collectively work on a document seen as time-saving and pro-actively embodying “teamwork”. These liberal capitalist aims are not self-evidently desirable, but a posthuman focus on connectivity might offer a way for these tools to be repurposed. Homing in on climate fiction – a sub-genre of literature that depictions climate change – and discovering it to frequently mired in dystopian landscapes that offer little hope, we posit that writing climate fiction collaboratively might be one way to use these technologies to both challenge fixed notions of where the imagination resides – inside the modernist individual genius – and to imagine different futures. To explore this hypothesis, we run Posthuman Artists’ Laboratories that re-position imagination as not centred in the internal, solitary self but engage with the notion of play and public imaginings of alternative ways of being. We propose that there is a strong (posthuman) argument for fiction writers to abandon the desire to be identified as one singular being with a unique voice and reimagine their creative subjectivities as a sticky web of connections.

 

This research is supported by the Flinders University Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts Research Grant Scheme.