Bristol Next Generation Visiting Research Programme

This University of Bristol funding allowed Dr. Christian Ehret from McGill University to be a Visiting Scholar for 6 weeks to work with Professor Rowsell when we completed an article, gave two seminars together (Bristol Conversations and at a Manchester Metropolitan University Posthuman Conference), and started working on a grant together.

Dr. Ehret's Research, in consultation with Professor Rowsell:Literacy can no longer be understood as an activity over which humans have full control. Humans’ everyday experiences with literacy are increasingly entangled with non-human actors, such as computational objects like bots and data, and larger computational systems such as algorithms and platforms. What does it mean to be critically literate in these new communicative conditions? Through this project, Drs. Ehret and Rowsell will collaborate to develop new questions and theoretic perspectives for understanding contemporary digital literacies and human meaning making that are crucial for sustaining civil discourse and individual agency and well-being within democratic societies. Their theory development will impact the fields of literacy studies and the learning sciences in which scholars currently contend with changing experiences of literacy in these collective, global conditions. While developing theoretic perspectives on these larger questions Ehret and Rowsell will focus their collaboration on developing a novel theory of critical literacy that brings into sharper relief the complete imbrication of human and non-human relations in the production of algorithmic cultures. Algorithmic cultures refer to the processes by which the constant flow of human activity online creates ‘big data’ that is parsed and fed into algorithms that help shape new cultural phenomena.

Dr. Ehret & Rowsell’s collaboration has produced (a) theoretic development focused on post-digital literacies, particularly youth literacies in algorithmic cultures, that (b) are informing a new research study begun in Bristol and currently progressing at McGill University through additional funding provided by McGill, and that are (c) informing the development of a major ERC funding bid for November 2023. During Dr. Ehret’s visit, this collaboration also result in three public engagements detailed in the following section. A final expected output is a research publication developed from item (b)—the ongoing McGill co-funded study, developed during the fellowship period.