Juha Suoranta

Teaching Sociology: Toward Collaborative Social Relations in Educational Situations

In this article I argue that pedagogical reform is needed in the current Westernized teaching of sociology to create a new, more equal, humane and ecologically sound world. Present teaching methods encourage instrumental approaches to studying and learning. As a result, students seem to have grown indifferent to learning, becoming mere reflections of their study environment. In confronting the needed pedagogical reform, I focus on the smallest particle of higher education — the structure of the teaching and learning process in the sociology classroom, and suggest the implementation of collaborative learning situations.

Postdigital science and education

We are increasingly no longer in a world where digital technology and media is separate, virtual, ‘other’ to a ‘natural’ human and social life. This has inspired the emergence of a new concept—‘the postdigital’— which is slowly but surely gaining traction in a wide range of disciplines including but not limited to the arts (Bishop, Gansing, Parikka, & Wilk, 2017 ; Monoskop, 2018), music (Cascone, 2000), architecture (Spiller, 2009), humanities (Hall, 2013 ; Tabbi, in press), (social) sciences (Taffel, 2016), and in many inter-, trans-, and post-disciplines between them (Berry & Dieter, 2015). Through this research, the term postdigital is slowly entering academic discourse. The University of Edinburgh’s Center for Research in Digital Education is seriously considering rebranding toward the postdigital (Bayne & Jandric, 2017, p. 204, see also Jandric, 2017, p. 201) ; Coventry University recently established the Center for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University, 2018) ; authors of this editorial are editors for the forthcoming journal Postdigital Science and Education

Fire Next Time: Or Revisioning Higher Education in the Context of Digital Social Creativity.

This article presents an idea of ‘digital social creativity’ as part of social media and examines an approach emphasising openness and experimentation and collaborative learning in the world of information and communication technologies. Wikipedia and similar digital tools provide both challenges to and possibilities for building learning sites in higher education and other forms of education and socialisation that recognise various forms of information and knowledge creation. The dialogical nature of knowledge and the emphasis on social interaction create a tremendous opportunity for education, but at the same time form new hegemonic battlegrounds in terms of various uses of social media.

A definition and criticism of cybercommunism

When Žižek (2002b) defines his idea of cybercommunism using an adaptation of the Leninist formula ‘Socialism = free access to internet + the power of the soviets’, he omits the crucial part about electricity. The cybercommunist idea that the information society is more ‘spectral’ and ‘malleable’ than were the previous ‘crudely’ economical societies conceals the question of what types of communities it favours. The political economy of cybercommunism also demands an analysis of the material conditions of cyber-freedom that can be conceptualised, for instance, in terms of levels of decreasing alienation.

Breaking Radical Monopolies: Towards Political Economy of Digital Literacy.

In this article, the authors argue for a leap from a ‘weak’ digital literacy (skills of interpretation and strategies of reception) to strong digital literacy (authorship and autonomous skills and capacities). Strong digital literacy implies politico-structural analysis of the information societies to come. Given the current forms of economic production and corporate markets, the liberating and democratic potential of digital information is counteracted by the concentration of media ownership, as well as by policy, legislation, and the development of propriety forms of technology. The authors apply the concept of radical monopoly in analysing the possibilities of strong digital literacy in two contexts: education and computer software. In these, as in other areas, digital technology promises abundance, but only if the formal vision of the information society in the singular is overcome. This would not only mean interaction and authorship, but breaking the preconfigured bubble of racially monopolised information.

The Silenced Students : Student Resistance in a Corporatized University

A silenced student merely receives pedagogical messages, consumes educational goods, and is supposed to obey taken-for-granted orders of the university. In this article, we illustrate how silencing happens as a consequence of a structural change in the balance of power between the Finnish government and the universities. The universities try to play safe due to the increased directive power of the government. This has had effects on how universities define the roles of students: In the changed conditions, the universities see students as clients whose purpose is to study and graduate, but not to revolt or act as political beings.

Towards Rebellious Research

Only slowly did I understand that if some of my most banal reactions were often misinterpreted, it was often because the manner – tone, voice, gestures, facial expressions, etc. – in which I sometimes manifested them, a mixture of aggressive shyness and a growling, even furious, bluntness, might be taken at face value, in other words, in a sense too seriously, and that it contrasted so much with the distant assurance of well-born Parisians that it always threatened to give the appearance of uncontrolled, querulous violence to reflex and sometimes purely ritual transgressions of the conventions and commonplaces of academic or intellectual routine. (Bourdieu, 2008, p. 89)