Abstract
I model a critical posthumanist pedagogy that uses text analysis software and is aimed at higher education students. A key purpose of the pedagogy is to help students enhance empathetic, critical and independent thinking. For their project assignment, the student chooses an unfamiliar campaign seeking to eliminate suffering and extend rights. They gather all texts from the campaign website into a corpus, which thus represents the campaign writ large. Then they use appropriate software to ascertain, efficiently and rigorously, common campaign concerns across this corpus. This puts students in a position to discern any significant concerns in the campaign corpus that are not addressed in text(s) supporting the status quo which the campaign opposes. Should significant omissions be found, students critically evaluate the status quo text(s) from the campaign’s perspective. Since this perspective derives from the student identifying (at least temporarily) with software generated data, it is a posthuman subjectivity. Engaging digitally and empathetically with a campaign’s data can broaden awareness of disadvantage, discrimination and suffering as well as expand horizons. Moreover, at the end of the assignment, the student is expected to formulate their own position vis-à-vis the previously unfamiliar campaign. Conditions have been created then for the student to enhance independent thinking too.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Digital Scholarship in the Humanities |
| Early online date | 8 Nov 2019 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 8 Nov 2019 |
Keywords
- posthumanism
- Posthuman pedagogy in higher education
- Digital text analysis
- Corpus Linguistics
- critical thinking