Literacies in Algorithmic Cultures
1 April - 13 May 2022
Biography
Dr Ehret is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University. His academic interests focus on developing social theory toward more affective, material, and embodied understandings of literacy and learning with digital media. His research responds to emerging, global dynamics of sociotechnical change that continue to complicate our emotional experiences of literacy and learning, especially what it means and feels like to be human when our communicative practices are augmented with more-than-human technologies, platforms, and algorithms. Dr Ehret is therefore particularly interested in affective dimensions of learning and literacies in relation to emerging technologies such as extended and virtual reality and artificial intelligence, especially as to how they impact literacy education for adolescents. Dr Ehret’s interest in these areas is equity-driven and includes the co-design of opportunities to learn with emerging technologies alongside communities where such opportunities have been institutionally and systematically constrained. These projects have involved funded work across the US and Canada in contexts such as children’s hospitals, public schools, and public libraries. His current research includes projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada on learning and critical literacies in relation to algorithms, algorithmic cultures, and in the context of livestreaming and Esports, or competitive videogaming, in urban youth centres.
Summary of research project
Literacy can no longer be understood as an activity over which humans have full control. Humans’ everyday experiences with literacy are increasingly entangled with non-human actors, such as computational objects like bots and data, and larger computational systems such as algorithms and platforms. Scholars across disciplines have worked to understand the implications of these entanglements for the production of culture and information. Meanwhile, these entanglements of humans and non-human technical actors have impacted everyday life at multiple scales: from the online amplification of post-truth politics across the globe, to the algorithmic personalization of location-based digital ads for individuals. Analyzing these communicative conditions that are produced through the relations of human and non-human agents online, scholars have employed terms such as algorithmic culture, platform society, and surveillance capitalism.
What does it mean to be critically literate in these new communicative conditions? What does it mean to be literate—indeed, to be human—if part of producing and consuming information and culture is affected by non-human technical actors? Through this project, Dr Ehret and Professor Rowsell will collaborate to develop new questions and theoretic perspectives for understanding contemporary digital literacies and human meaning making that are crucial for sustaining civil discourse and individual agency and well-being within democratic societies. Their theory development will impact the fields of literacy studies and the learning sciences in which scholars currently contend with changing experiences of literacy in these collective, global conditions. While developing theoretic perspectives on these larger questions Ehret and Rowsell will focus their collaboration on developing a novel theory of critical literacy that brings into sharper relief the complete imbrication of human and non-human relations in the production of algorithmic cultures. Algorithmic cultures refer to the processes by which the constant flow of human activity online creates ‘big data’ that is parsed and fed into algorithms that help shape new cultural phenomena.
Dr Ehret is hosted by Professor Jennifer Rowsell, School of Education
Planned activities include (Dates and times TBA):
Open lecture:
Emerging digital literacies in algorithmic cultures: Working algorithms for critical participation and well- being,
Seminar for UoB researchers and postgraduates:
Researching participation, equity, and well-being in more-than- human digital cultures,
Teaching critical literacies in algorithmic cultures,
