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Theme: Navigating Methodological Complexities in a Postdigital World. Exploring possible future(s).
The Call for Book Proposals Approved by the Academic Board of February 24th, 2025
The Next-Gen Scholarship series (Collana SPEF) highlights the voices of doctoral students in education, fostering intergenerational dialogue between PhD candidates and their supervisors. Each volume invites contributions that combine theoretical depth, methodological innovation, and reflexive accounts of the researcher’s journey.
For the 2025–2026 volume, we invite chapters on the theme in the following section, directed by Andrea Porcarelli and Juliana Raffaghelli.
Educational research unfolds in a postdigital condition where the analog and digital, human and non-human, qualitative and quantitative continuously blur and entangle (Jandrić et al., 2018, 2023). In this context, traditional methodological boundaries are destabilized, and PhD scholars are asked to grapple with uncertainty, risk, and innovation in their research practices.
Two currents particularly shape this complexity:
Postqualitative approaches (St. Pierre, 2020) that interrogate knowledge production beyond representationalist logics, foregrounding entanglement, ontology, and relational ethics.
Postquantitative approaches, exemplified in refined forms of prediction and quantitative ethnography (Shaffer, 2017), that combine statistical rigor with sensitivity to human meaning-making in complex datasets.
Rather than standing in opposition, these currents intersect in the postdigital landscape, where methodological creativity must embrace both data intensity and human irreducibility. Researchers face the challenge of integrating algorithmic prediction, data mining, and learning analytics with critical, feminist, and creative perspectives on data (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020; Posavec & Lupi, 2016).
A further layer of complexity emerges when working with futures: research as anticipation rather than prediction (Poli, 2019; Ross, 2016; Miller & Tuomi, 2022). Futures-oriented methods invite educational scholars to inhabit the “not-yet,” exploring scenarios, speculations, and risks (Biesta, 2013), but also to understand the past and history of education as integral to methodological reflexivity.
We welcome contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following:
The topics should be connected through reflexive accounts of doctoral journeys navigating these methodological entanglements, including methodological decisions and ethical dilemmas to undertake one or another research pathway.
In a nutshell, this volume invites PhD candidates to embrace the messiness of the postdigital and to explore how postqualitative and postquantitative perspectives can be combined to respond to the challenges of human (pedagogical/educational) agency in a world dominated by technocratic discourses relating to a future that can be entirely “predicted”.
Each chapter should include:
Please submit abstracts and later manuscripts to juliana.raffaghelli@unipd.it and andrea.porcarelli@unipd.it, cc PhD Supervisor (who will co-author the chapter]. Indicate your PhD curriculum (Pedagogical Sciences / Inclusion, Well-being, Sustainability in Education) and year of study.
Biesta, G. (2013). The beautiful risk of education. Routledge.
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.
Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000
Jandrić, P., MacKenzie, A., & Knox, J. (2023). Postdigital research: Genealogies, challenges, and future perspectives. In P. Jandrić, A. MacKenzie, & J. Knox (Eds.), Postdigital research (pp. 3–42). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31299-1_1
Posavec, S., & Lupi, G. (2016). Dear data. Princeton Architectural Press.
Poli, R. (2019). Lavorare con il futuro. Idee e strumenti per governare l’incertezza. Egea.
Ross, J. (2016). Speculative method in digital education research. Learning, Media and Technology, 41(2), 214–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2015.1107090
Shaffer, D. W. (2017). Quantitative ethnography. Cathcart Press.
St. Pierre, E. A. (2020). Why post qualitative inquiry? Qualitative Inquiry, 27(2), 163–166. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420931142
Miller, R., & Tuomi, I. (2022). Making the futures of AI in education: Why and how imagining the future matters. European Journal of Education, 57(4), 537–541. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12535
