The Centre for Research in Digital Education welcome Jessica Parola as Visiting PhD Researcher until March 2025.
Jessica is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Sciences
of the University of Naples Federico II. She is a digital sociologist.
Her research focuses on the digitalisation in/of education. Adopting a
post-structuralist and Science and Technology Studies approach she
specifically investigates how the introduction of Artificial
Intelligence and Robotics contributes to a reconfiguration of
educational processes.
At the Centre and the Edinburgh Future Institute, she is focusing on the imaginary of
robotics in education and its enactment in schools’ materialities,
analysing a case-study, whose action plan included the co-design and the
experimental introduction of a classmate robot and its platform in four
Italian classrooms.
Viewing robotics in education as an assemblage where
heterogeneous technologies, values, policies, imaginaries,
subjectivities, and educational framework converge, her analysis focuses
on how robotics is animated by particularly powerful imaginaries and
ways of thinking about digital futures that unfold in how educational
practices are conducted; and how its enactment intertwines with the
spatio-temporal dimensions in a context-sensitive way.