Controversy mapping, discursive and material edtech regimes: the case of educational inclusion for refugees

Description

Digital technologies pervade how education is imagined and structured for marginalized groups. The discourses and materialities of edtech are seductive in these contexts, increasingly bound in efforts around educational inclusion and reinforced through global discursive and governance regimes which present them as a means for inclusion and social mobility. This paper takes as its starting point one of the most marginalized groups – refugees – considering how efforts aimed at inclusion present digital technologies as a self-evident and practical constituent.

These regimes tend to generate discursive closures (Markham, 2021), shutting down alternative approaches whilst rendering subsequent technologies more difficult to resist, reimagine, or recontextualize in the contexts of forced displacement. Normative expressions such as these homogenize efforts at educational inclusion and further submerge the polemics of digital technology use. These polemics, we argue, are controversies that need to be surfaced to re-engage with the complexities of increasingly invasive technologies and the regimes that sponsor them. Most visibly, we see evidence of this in the compassionate repression of biometric verification (Lazzolino, 2021); efforts at connected or blended learning for refugees (Dryden-Peterson et al., 2017); or perhaps most problematically, the nonhuman humanitarianism of AI use in refugee inclusion efforts (Madianou, 2021).

We propose controversy mapping as a methodology for surfacing sociotechnical polemics and discourses; not only for the purposes of academic analysis, but more crucially to inform critical understandings between key actors in real world contexts. Controversies here go beyond more malignant aspects of contention, rather we adopt a nuanced definition as “moments of ontological disturbance” (Whatmore 2009, p 587); opportunities to ‘see’ issues in different ways. The cartographic method draws from Actor-Network Theory and digital methods, aiming to “unfold sociotechnical disputes in a conceptual space” (Venturini and Monk 2022, p 5). We suggest that mapping controversies, based on ‘quali-quantitative’ data, can help to create a space for engaging with the meta, mesa and micro level narratives of digital technology adoption. We will consider not only a critical discussion of edtech in marginalized contexts, but also of controversy mapping as a methodology; it’s theoretical contradictions, critical cartographies, and politics of data visualization (D’Ignazio 2017).

Period	2025
Event title	European Conference on Critical Edtech Studies (ECCES)
Event type	Conference
Location	Zurich, SwitzerlandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International