Keri Facer
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Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, Visiting Professor at SLU, Uppsala and Professor of Public Education at Black Mountains College. Her work focuses specifically on cultivating what she calls the ‘temporal imagination’ – the capacity to work critically with ideas of time, rhythm, pasts and futures to open up possibilities for individual and collective agency - in conditions of environmental and technological change. Working with a variety of methods – including critical discourse analysis, participatory design, storytelling and ethnography – she works across disciplines and sectors to enable the creation of democratic, inclusive imagination infrastructure. She has written on education in many forms – from schools to universities, learning in the home to public pedagogy – and considers all to be significant in nurturing transitions towards more just and sustainable worlds.
At present, she leads the British Academy ‘Times of a Just Transition’ Global Convening programme which brings together 20 participants from around the world to surface the way that time works as a form of invisible power in negotiations around sustainability transitions. She is Co-Investigator on the ESRC Sociodigital Futures Centre where, along with colleagues Arathi Sriprakash, Ben Williamson and Jessica Pykett she is exploring the role of VR in educating the imagination and examining how to surface alternative futures for education in the world of AI, robotics and networks. And she is working in partnership with Woven Earth to explore what it might mean to reconnect humans and land in a 150 hectare regenerative farm.
She has worked with a wide range of NGO and political partners, from her recent collaboration with the Joseph Rowntree Fund in support of their Emerging Futures Programme, to her role as member of the writing team for the UNESCO Futures of Education Commission. Previously, she was Zennström Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University. From 2012-2018 she led the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities Programme, a £40m programme of university-community collaboration. Her work in educational futures has seen her partner with organisations from the BBC, the UK’s Department for Education and Electronic Arts to local city farms, ecovillages and community organisations. Her books include ‘Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change’ and ‘Working with Time in Qualitative Research’. She is joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Futures and edits the Routledge Book Series on Futures and Anticipation.
Address: Graduate School of Education
University of Bristol
35 Berkeley Square
Bristol
BS8 1JA
Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, Visiting Professor at SLU, Uppsala and Professor of Public Education at Black Mountains College. Her work focuses specifically on cultivating what she calls the ‘temporal imagination’ – the capacity to work critically with ideas of time, rhythm, pasts and futures to open up possibilities for individual and collective agency - in conditions of environmental and technological change. Working with a variety of methods – including critical discourse analysis, participatory design, storytelling and ethnography – she works across disciplines and sectors to enable the creation of democratic, inclusive imagination infrastructure. She has written on education in many forms – from schools to universities, learning in the home to public pedagogy – and considers all to be significant in nurturing transitions towards more just and sustainable worlds.
At present, she leads the British Academy ‘Times of a Just Transition’ Global Convening programme which brings together 20 participants from around the world to surface the way that time works as a form of invisible power in negotiations around sustainability transitions. She is Co-Investigator on the ESRC Sociodigital Futures Centre where, along with colleagues Arathi Sriprakash, Ben Williamson and Jessica Pykett she is exploring the role of VR in educating the imagination and examining how to surface alternative futures for education in the world of AI, robotics and networks. And she is working in partnership with Woven Earth to explore what it might mean to reconnect humans and land in a 150 hectare regenerative farm.
She has worked with a wide range of NGO and political partners, from her recent collaboration with the Joseph Rowntree Fund in support of their Emerging Futures Programme, to her role as member of the writing team for the UNESCO Futures of Education Commission. Previously, she was Zennström Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University. From 2012-2018 she led the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities Programme, a £40m programme of university-community collaboration. Her work in educational futures has seen her partner with organisations from the BBC, the UK’s Department for Education and Electronic Arts to local city farms, ecovillages and community organisations. Her books include ‘Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change’ and ‘Working with Time in Qualitative Research’. She is joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Futures and edits the Routledge Book Series on Futures and Anticipation.
Address: Graduate School of Education
University of Bristol
35 Berkeley Square
Bristol
BS8 1JA
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The thesis begins by arguing that the mid 1990s witnessed a proliferation of popular, political and academic discourses of childhood and technology, which characterised children as ‘digital natives’ and which presented children’s seemingly natural facility with digital technology use as heralding the potential for new relationships between children and adults. In order to understand the implications of these representations, the thesis:
1. Conducts a review of the literature of childhood studies, and of childhood in the context of new formations characterised as the ‘information society’;
2. Examines the relationship between language and society, exploring specifically the concepts of ‘hegemony, articulation, recontextualisation, and appropriation/colonisation’ drawn from Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, Bernstein and Hall’s analyses of the role of discourse in political and social change; and
3. Develops a metholodology based upon Critical Discourse Analysis, in order to provide an account of the relationship between discursive representations of childhood and the social practices and institutions in which these representations are enacted or resisted.
The data analysed in the thesis comprise:
1. New Labour political speeches between 1996 and 2001, focusing specifically upon Tony Blair’s speeches and upon the chain of texts linking Blair’s 1996 conference speech, the Stevenson Report and the National Grid for Learning
2. 997 newspaper articles from the years 1997 and 2001, analysed through both a corpus analysis and detailed textual analysis of selected articles
3. 5 Interviews with 6 families in the home conducted between 1998 and 2000
On the basis of this analysis, the thesis contends that, while children were repesented as having significant agency and ‘natural affinity’ with digital technologies in this period (representations which did challenge traditional adult-child relations of the ‘dominant framework’) this new form of agency was colonised within wider educational policy to act as a warrant for a ‘personalisation’ of educational provision and a de-articulation of childhood from the institutions of home and school. This process of colonisation serves to obscure the differences in resources available to different children in achieving agency in the context of the ‘information age’, and serves to create equivalences between different social groupings acting with very different political and social agendas.