Toward a postdigital ethnography in higher education: a sociomaterial framework to analyze hybrid episodes of university culture

This article proposes a conceptual and methodological framework to investigate higher education from a postdigital ethnography. It starts from the premise that contemporary university life is configured as an ecology of practices, mediations, and intertwined temporalities that exceeds the face-to-face/virtual and online/offline binaries. In this context, it proposes shifting the unit of observation from discrete “sites” (classroom or platform) to the hybrid episode, understood as a stretch of activity in which institutional scripts, sociomaterial mediations, and everyday repertoires circulate, are translated, and reach provisional closures. As analytical contributions, two complementary lenses are proposed: the teaching dispositif, to describe ritualized regimes of legitimation and academic evidence, and the cultural pidgin, as the collective product of translations and resemanticizations through which students and teachers negotiate meanings in tension with those regimes. Methodologically, the article does not prescribe a closed protocol; it offers propositional conditions for fieldwork and analysis: situated reflexivity, multimodal attention to frictions and “imponderables,” and a co-created thick interpretation, accompanied by ethical safeguards commensurate with the sensitivity of digital tracing. Taken together, the proposal seeks to strengthen the capacity of educational research to describe, with rigor, how policies, platforms, and practices materialize in postdigital university culture, and it delineates an empirical agenda for future studies on algorithmic mediations, regimes of evidence, and everyday resistances.