Educational Illusion and Collapse: Postdigital Classrooms as Places of Entangled Encounter(ing)

Abstract In this conceptual paper, we argue that the idea of future-making intensifies the totalising logic of quantified and commodified learning experiences. By situating our analysis within postdigital theory, we offer a novel contribution to understanding how digital infrastructures reshape pedagogical relations. Incorporating interdisciplinary theoretical conceptions of space, time, and structure, we emphasise the need for reimagining educational spaces beyond deterministic narratives of technological progress and warn against the danger of idolising the past by engaging the concept of hiraeth. Instead, we focus on education as a relational and co-constituted process with multiplicity and a longer historicity than its institutions. We conceive the postdigital as a euphemism for the collapse of purpose and meaning of education to emphasise links between materiality, digitalisation, capitalism, and pedagogy. This paper extends postdigital scholarship by emphasising how educational spaces are sites of entangled encounters rather than stable structures. They require new theoretical frameworks to account for their ongoing reconfiguration and to disentangle the conflated goals of capitalism and education.