Our events are taking place on Thursday 20 February and Friday 21 February. Feel free to reach out, if you would like to participate. We may still have a few free spaces. Each event explores four questions, each event is face-to-face, each event is focused on talking, sharing, inter-thinking. (No presentations, no slides, no flights!) We will be thinking about:

#1. What are the pressing issues, concerns, tensions and problems that surround EdTech in our locality? What questions do we need to ask, and what approaches will help us research these questions?

#2. What social harms are we seeing associated with digital technology and education in our locality?

#3. What does the political economy of EdTech look like in our region? What do local EdTech markets look like? How are global Big Tech corporations manifest in local education systems? What does EdTech policy look like, and which actors are driving policymaking? What do we find if we ‘follow the money’?

#4. What grounds for hope are there? Can we point to local instances of digital technology leading to genuine social benefits and empowerment? What local push-back and resistance against egregious forms of EdTech is evident? What alternate imaginaries are being circulated about education and digital futures?

More information on the Gothenburg meet-up here: https://www.credtech.se/en/cset2025

More on Oldenburg here (in German): https://relab.uol.de/2024/11/06/cset2025-oldenburg/

More on Buenos Aires here:

Local meet-ups will each capture their key responses to the questions, which will feed into an international report on critical studies of education and technology (CSET) that collates ideas from across the local meet-ups.

Lesley Gourlay, Professor of Education at University College in London, was invited to do a workshop at the DIE in Mexico City for the regional RED team and other scholars from Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.

The workshop took place on May 22, 2024 and focused on visual methodologies and what they bring into educational research. It began with a brief introduction in which Lesley talked about her own research and how she came to use drawings, photos and mapping as key parts of the process and immediately she invited each one of the 25 people attending – scholars, doctoral and master students, post-doctoral researchers – to take pictures of significant places at the DIE building.

The photos showed very different places from the building, which meant very different things for people who work there every day, visiting scholars, or students about to finish their programs. Using these resources, Lesley proposed a photo elicitation exercise in which, in pairs, the images were discussed following a set of questions.

Based upon this experience, Lesley discussed how visual methodologies such as working with photos enable the researcher to discover and inquire about things that don’t ‘emerge in a “regular” interview, in which there is very little place for details and nuances.

Using photo elicitation, as Lesley proposes, opens conversations involving embodiment, materiality, space, temporality, relationality and human-technology relationships.

The RED team shared visual productions such as drawings and diagrams produced during fieldwork in Mexico and Argentina, and they were discussed by Lesley and the other participants.

Photo by Alexander Wang on Unsplash