The Digital Education in the Global South research theme explores the present and future political economies of educational technology use, and the everyday practices of negotiation, consumption, and resistance presented in digital education in the Global South. This theme provides space to critique the dominant modes of knowledge production in digital education, and to explore alternative modes that are a: responsive to the needs and material realities of the local context b: non-uniform in adhering to the increasingly homogenizing models of global digital education, and c: sensitive to both community and the environment.
Our work engages explicitly with marginalisation, that process of pushing a particular group or groups of people to the edge of the dominant regimes of power in local, regional, and international educational regimes through direct or indirect means, whether as an exclusion from resources and decision-making, or through prevailing discourse and policy. As such, a particular focus of our work is on refugee inclusion in education and the role that technology might play there.
We want the outcomes of our research to:
- contribute to broader discussions about the impact of technology on the structure of education in the Global South
- surface the broad array of digital education practices present in the Global South, ones characterised by appropriate and at times frugal technological use and non-use
- Provide methodological and analytical insights for policymakers, civil society organisations, and governments to explore the ways in which technology can meaningfully support education, the agency of teachers, and inclusion for the most marginalised.