@inbook{49562b9a85a14b3cb93cec330dc61aa8,
title = "Speculation: Challenging the invisibility and inevitability of data in education",
abstract = "Speculation is a resource for critical analysis of data-driven postdigital education. In particular, speculative methods help researchers challenge the invisibility of data-driven educational practices, and thereby unsettle the apparent inevitability of data futures. Working against these tendencies towards invisibility and inevitability requires critical imagination, and speculative methods help foster this for researchers and participants. This chapter introduces speculative methods and explores their enactment in a research project that examined the social and ethical implications of datafication in higher education. The research involved ethnographic and speculative engagement with students at a research-intensive university in Scotland, attempting to understand student experiences of and perspectives on emerging data-driven technologies and practices, and what this meant for their relationship with the university. In this chapter we analyze the design of, and data generated through two particular speculative methods: data walking, and thinking otherwise. We show how speculation was central to efforts to prompt ethical reflection on data-driven practices by making hidden practices visible to participants and opening up possibilities of thinking otherwise about data futures.",
keywords = "speculation, speculative methods, visibility and invisibility, data walking, fabulation, fabrication, discursive closures, ethics, thinking otherwise",
author = "Joe Noteboom and Jen Ross",
year = "2024",
month = jul,
doi = "10.1007/978-3-031-58622-4_10",
language = "English",
isbn = "9783031586217",
series = "Postdigital Science and Education",
publisher = "Springer",
pages = "181--194",
editor = "Anders Buch and Ylva Lindberg and {Cerratto Pargman}, Teresa",
booktitle = "Framing Futures in Postdigital Education",
}