Review of Lesley Gourlay (2021). Posthumanism and the Digital University: Texts, Bodies and Materialities: London: Bloomsbury. 191 pp. ISBN 9781350038172 (Hardcover)

Citation

Thompson TL (2022) Review of Lesley Gourlay (2021). Posthumanism and the Digital University: Texts, Bodies and Materialities: London: Bloomsbury. 191 pp. ISBN 9781350038172 (Hardcover). Postdigital Science and Education, 4, pp. 612-617. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00244-6

Abstract
First paragraph: In Posthumanism and the Digital University: Texts, Bodies and Materialities, Lesley Gourlay (2021) explores the relevance of posthuman theorizing for better understanding the increasing digital mediation of higher education. More specifically, she sets out to ‘examine in detail how the world of the digital interacts with texts, artefacts, devices, and people, in the contemporary university setting’ in order to better understand ‘how knowledge practices intersect with the digital’ (Gourlay 2021: 1). Her commitment to posthumanism sensibilities enables her to engage creatively and fruitfully to disrupt binaries. This includes those between analogue/face-to-face and digital/online. As Gourlay (2021: 37) explains, ‘the adjective “digital” reproduces one of the effects I aim to critique in this book, the binary notion that a “pure” digital realm exists, separate from the analogue, the material and the embodied’.

Keywords
Posthumanism; Higher education; Interviewing objects; Digital university; Datafiction; Digital pedagogy

Journal
Postdigital Science and Education: Volume 4

People

Dr Terrie-Lynn Thompson

Senior Lecturer, Education