Postdigital science and education and the majority world

This commentary discusses how the Majority World framing provides postdigital utility in interrogating how particular realities, structures, and narratives govern the political economy of technology. This is a political economy in the Majority World that cannot be separated from the effects of its design, use, and subsequent disposal. A Majority World framing surfaces how diversity of epistemologies are being flattened through the processes of aligning social practices with Minority World technological systems. We argue that a pluriversal framing -where many worlds, ways of knowing, and imaginaries of technology use coexist- resists that flattening and enriches postdigital critique and imagination. Some of this flattening is a consequence of the singular narrative of digital development, one advanced by the Minority World that supports extractivist, neocolonial relations and erases the vernacular and the diversity of much of the Majority World.

As such, we argue for building on existing postdigital work to critique the dominant modes of knowledge production and technology use being advanced by the Minority World, and to surface alternatives to this from the Majority World that are: (a) responsive to the needs and material realities of the local contexts therein, and (b) communal and autonomous imaginations of postdigital education.