A return to Teacherbot:Rethinking the development of educational technology at the University of Edinburgh

In the market discourses of technological disruption, higher education institutions have routinely been positioned in deficit models and of anachronistic approaches to teaching at odds with the types of educational futures being presented by commercial organisations. Predominantly, automation technologies in the form of artificial intelligence are being promoted as the future of teaching. In this paper, on the other hand, we explore the prospects for using non-artificial intelligence automated agents in teaching and its impact on the teacher function at the University of Edinburgh. Through engagement with teachers, staff and students at the university, this research has identified use cases for bots, in what spaces they would be situated, and how they would supplement the teacher function. This paper argues that a community-driven approach combined with a sociomaterial conceptualisation can generate a shift from market discourses and to collaborative development of educational technologies

Re-negotiating notions of place: Tigrayan migration to Addis Ababa

Music in praise of God is playing nonstop. When the woman covered in a white shawl sitting next to me offers me roasted grains, the circumstances of the journey fade into the background of my consciousness. She asks me in Amharic if I have tasted qollo before, and when I pass this poorly-hidden language test, she starts to question me about my origin and purpose for being in Ethiopia. Answering to the best of my ability, I soon find myself engaged in a conversation about the challenges many E..

Ghost hunting in the broken archives:Re-historicizing digital education in an institutional context

Digital education is often presented as breaking from tradition. A failure to account for how digital education emerges from historical institutional activity is problematic insofar as this activity continues to circulate through the present and future, appearing and disappearing in often unexpected ways. Using Derrida’s hauntology as a theoretical lens, this paper traces how a digital education initiative at the University of Edinburgh in 2003 carried through to the creation of a course to train teachers to teach online in 2019, which in turn informed the university’s response to the pandemic in 2020. Working in a broadly autoethnographic way alongside archival document analysis, several findings emerged. First, hauntology provides a mechanism for institutions to trace their own histories and to note how these histories, often hidden in archives or carried forward into the present by hosts, inform their present and future trajectories. Second, broken archives, those that have ceased to function as active repositories but are disconnected from institutional domains and ontologies, shut due to absent gatekeepers, or merely forgotten, contribute​ to the sudden and often unexpected emergence of hauntings in present and future trajectories. Third, curation of the archive is an act of reinterpretation, one that troubles historical narratives and introduces new hauntings. All these findings assert a re-historicizing of digital education by emphasising the hauntings from the past that inform its emergent present and contested future, countering many of the ahistorical imaginaries of digital education

Pursuing progress: urban-urban migration and meanings of being middle class in Ethiopia

Over the past two decades, major political, economic and social shifts have reshaped hierarchical relations in Ethiopia. The country has seen new dynamics of ethnic power relations and a rapid expansion of higher education, while the government’s authoritarian developmental discourse has permeated people’s lives and influenced their everyday perspectives on modernity and progress. Taking these conditions as its starting point, this thesis examines how people have responded to social change as individuals and in connection to relationships with others. It interrogates how these broader patterns of social relations have transformed through urban to urban migration – an important form of migration in Ethiopia, yet one that is largely unexamined within studies of Ethiopian migration. To understand the sociocultural dimensions of these processes, this thesis analyses the formations of hierarchical relations in terms of class, drawing strongly on Bourdieu’s (1984, 1986) class theory and elaboration of cultural, material, social and symbolic capital. Through an emphasis on the contextual values of capital in Ethiopia, this thesis focuses on how migration to modern places creates the opportunities for new interactions with people of diverse backgrounds. In doing so, the thesis analyses how urban to urban migration shapes the possession and use of various forms of capital. The study employs higher education, ethnicity and progress as lenses to identify how everyday social processes surrounding urban to urban migration produce social distinctions. The ethnographic research that led to this analysis drew out the intersections and tensions between physical movement and social mobilities by relying on a multi-sited approach, with research carried out in Adigrat and Addis Ababa. Throughout, the thesis explores its central aim, which is to interrogate the role of urban to urban migration in generating a group with distinct cultural practices and shared characteristics that can be described as being middle class in contemporary Ethiopia

Beyond #FeesMustFall: International students, fees and everyday agency in the era of decolonisation

The #FeesMustFall movement focused on the financial struggles of historically disadvantaged black students in South Africa. However, if decolonisation is to go beyond national boundaries and to incorporate pan-African visions fees must fall, not only in South Africa, but also for international students. Yet, international students and their financial situations are often overlooked in discussions over fees as they are seen as foreigners, or as privileged and seeking to reproduce advantage through international study. Although international fees cross-subsidise national students, international students are seen as an export category rather than at the level of the individual, so that the actual costs of study to the students is often ignored. This paper addresses that gap by examining how international distance education students studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) navigate fees. We draw upon students’ narratives to highlight the proactive and reactive agency they deploy to afford and manage fee payments. These quieter registers of everyday agency around fees demonstrate the entanglement of national and international fees in higher education. In particular, we suggest that focusing on international student fees raises important questions about whether lowering fees for higher education students, one part of the decolonisation agenda, should be contained within national borders

Conceptualising place and non-place in internationalisation of higher education research

Space and place are central concepts in research on the internationalisation of higher education. However, although the spaces of international student migration have been theorised (Raghuram, 2013), there is a limited understanding of how place matters in the internationalisation literature. This paper schematises this literature to highlight the main ways in which place and internationalisation have been brought together in the current research. It extends the current analysis by exploring the place as location, as locales produced in and through networks - personal, institutional, national, contemporary and historical - and universities as non-places. The paper draws on research with Zimbabwean, Nigerian and Namibian international distance education students who study at the University of South Africa (UNISA) to construct a conceptual architecture of different forms of place and non-place. It ends by setting out a new perspective and research agenda on progressive politics of place for those studying the internationalisation of higher education

Disentangling Following: Implications and Practicalities of Mobile Methods

The increasing interest in mobilities among social scientists over the past two decades has generated new research approaches to deepen the understanding of people’s diverse movements. These methods have focused on capturing research participants’ mobilities, but also led to new ways of thinking about researchers’ mobilities as a strategy to collect data. In this paper, we explore the relationship between researchers and research participants’ mobilities through the idea of ‘following’. Drawing on insights from the Moving Marketplaces research project on eight markets in the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, we highlight the lack of beginnings and endings of following. This leads us to a reflection on what to actually follow as well as an analysis of the doings of following. This paper examines some of the unexplored terrains in the conceptual and methodological debate around following and argues that it is essential to reflexively engage with the implications and practicalities of this approach. We argue that it is more productive to regard following not only as the physical process of following people, objects, knowledge, etc., but also as a theoretical and methodological openness that embraces and articulates the dynamic and non-linear character of ethnographic research practices

De-migranticizing as methodology: rethinking migration studies through immobility and liminality

De-migranticization is becoming a core strategy for overcoming the fetishization of migrants in migration studies. However, this shift in perspectives raises questions about what categories to use instead. This paper contributes to these debates by considering the potential of studying immobility as a tool for de-migranticization. It looks at immobility through the lens of liminality: as a transitory phase, as a transformative stage and as one which enables epistemological subversion. In doing so, it goes beyond other border spanning terms to offer methodological insights into using immobility and liminality to de-migranticize. The paper suggests that these qualities of reading immobility through theories of liminality has implications for when, where and how to study migration. The empirical case draws on 165 semi-structured interviews with distance education students from Zimbabwe, Namibia and Nigeria studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA)