CRADLE Seminar Series Nostalgic stories, academic imaginaries & the digital

30 October 2024

WEDNESDAY

2 p.m.

In this presentation we hear from CRADLE Fellowship holder Dr Ros Black. In her Fellowship project Ros investigated how collective imaginaries shape the recent and future development of online teaching and the role of senior academics. We are delighted that Ros will share her research outcomes and insights with us.

While digital tools and technologies have become integral to current teaching practices in higher education, their development and implementation is also imbued with stories of the future. Especially with the advent of artificial intelligence, the digital is either associated with the promise of more creative, responsive and accessible pedagogies and the better development of graduates’ future-oriented skills and employability, or else with concerns about what dystopian outcomes might emerge from a future university dominated by technology. Despite this, when as part of a recent CRADLE Fellowship research project we asked senior academics in Australia and the United Kingdom about how they envisage the future of the digital in higher education, a strong story emerged of nostalgia and of lost real or imagined academic pasts. Drawing on selected data from that project, this presentation reflects on what nostalgic stories of the academy may be shaping our orientation to the digital and what these stories may mean, both for the senior academics who narrate them and for the sector as a whole.

Join us for this compelling and this topical presentation at Downtown or online.

31346-ros-black">span> is Senior Lecturer in Education at Deakin University and a recent CRADLE Fellow. Her research interests meet at the intersection of the sociologies of education, higher education and youth. They include the nature and implications of educational imaginaries within schooling and higher education; the changing nature of academic identity, labour and communities; and imagined youth futures in critical and precarious times and places