Postdigital design for critical digital literacy education. Relationality, sympoiesis and experimental re-assembling

Postdigital design for critical digital literacy education. 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Relationality, sympoiesis and experimental re-assembling Sara Pastore, Emiliano Grimaldi This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-9291705/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Educators are increasingly asked to design digital literacy experiences. Yet most attempts, we argue, suffer from limitations imposed by a deterministic – either social or technological – perspective, where humans and machines are assumed as competing for control and literacy is equated with mastery. In this article we propose to reconceptualize digital literacy at the crossroads between a critical approach and a postdigital perspective and show what implication it has for the design of digital literacy education. At the conceptual level, we present our distinctive understanding of a critical postdigital literacy, based on a relational ontology, a sympoietic rationality and an understanding of education as more-than-human subjectivation. At the design level, using as an example the case of a series of art-based digital literacy workshops, we show how such a conceptualization enables a particular kind of design for postdigital critical literacy practices. Through an experimental exercise in sociological fiction, we discuss how students engaged in a socio-material, bodily and aesthetics practice of critical digital literacy as experimental re-assembling. In conclusion we discuss how the perspective we experimented with offers a different way to approach the nexus between the politics of design for digital literacy education and citizenship in a postdigital world. Here literacy practices are understood as ways to nurture the capacity of heterogeneous agencies to participate in the ongoing bargaining that any postdigital assemblage demands and, relatedly, to promote citizenship as a process of becoming which involves collective and distributed participation and thinking for the common good. Postdigital literacy critical literacy relational ontology sympoiesis sociological fiction art-based education Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Introduction Recent developments in digital technologies, including AI, have rehearsed academic, policy and public debates on digital literacy, intended comprehensively as an evolving set of skills and practices with implications for the development of informed digital citizenship in contemporary societies (Allaste and Waechter, 2025 ). Relatedly, educators and educational institutions are urged to design and provide learners with opportunities to develop digital literacy, framed as an activity of “knowledge assembly” and alternatively conceptualized as “mastery and operational proficiency, or evaluation and critique” (Pangrazio and Sefton-Green, 2021, p. 20). Despite the plurality of meanings and definitions associated with the notion of digital literacy in institutional/policy frameworks and contemporary debates (Wuyckens et al., 2022 ; Jandrić and Hayes, 2025), in educational practice it is recognisable the dominance of an instrumental and cognitive-based framing of literacy development (Bhatt, 2023 ). Such a framing is mirrored in the articulation of pedagogical strategies which assume digital literacy as an individual form of action and promote a range of pragmatically oriented approaches designed to, first and foremost, prepare young people for engagement in digital environments (Emejulu and McGregor, 2019 ). In this context, developing digital literacy is equated to the enhancement of students’ knowledge or their “empowerment” in the navigation of the digital world – an equation that often results in an unproductive dichotomous risk/opportunity approach (Garavaglia and Petti, 2025, 4). In contrast to that, an increasing number of scholars and educators in the field of digital literacy have engaged with new conceptualizations and experimented with different modes of designing in what is understood as a post-digital world, one where we can observe a profound entrenchment of digital technologies into essentially all areas of life (Jandric, 2019). Conceptually, this means to combine a semiotic and materialist approach to frame literacy as practice and to recognize “the significance of the material objects and technologies” in shaping literacy practices, while at the same time considering technology “as one component of a larger literacy assemblage where both human agency and subjectivity play a critical role in forms of mutual co-creating of texts and technology” (Bhatt, 2023 , p. 3). As Falgren Christensen et al. ( 2025 ) suggest, this involves a set of distinctive design moves. First, it calls to overcome a conception of literacy development as fostering “ how to do’ (s)” or merely “intellectual participation”, while fully embracing the idea to design and enact educational experiences which assume that (postdigital) literacy “is about lived experiences”. Second, it requires to take seriously ‘the role of the material artefacts’ (Gourlay, 2015 , p. 485), the bodily incorporated understandings of practices in the development of literacies, including the digital one. Third, in terms of educational design, this involves balancing the foregrounding of learners’ intellectual development with an equal and symmetric emphasis on the use of “the material and bodily prerequisites and instantiations of literacy” (Falgren Christensen et al., 2025 , p. 8). In this article we intend to contribute to this debate, both at the conceptual and design level, working at the crossroads between a critical approach that problematizes knowledge, power and authority in everyday life literacy practices and a postdigital take on digital literacy education. At the conceptual level, we endorse a postdigital perspective on literacy, joining those authors who emphasize the need to rethink literacy practices as entanglements of humans and technologies and adopt a view of agency as emergent and distributed (Bennett, 2020 ). More specifically, we repurpose the idea of critical digital literacy through the lens of postdigital approaches (Jandric, 2019): through this combination we aim to enable a non-dichotomic and non-reductionist understanding of critical digital literacy (or literacies), attentive to the multiple materialities, forces and agencies entangled in sociodigital encounters. In this vein, we present our distinctive understanding of a critical postdigital literacy, unravelling its ontological underpinnings, the kind of spatial and temporal rationality it conveys, the way in which agency is conceived and, finally, what meaning literacy education assumes in such a frame. Relatedly, at the design level, we intend to show how such a conceptualization enables a particular kind of design for digital literacy practices, that values the diversity of the roles of actors (human and non-human) and aesthetics that (could) participate in learners’ development of literacy. To do so, we present an experience in the design and realization of a series of art-based media education and digital literacy workshops. Students engaged in a socio-material, bodily and aesthetics practice of digital literacy, which unfolded in two phases: a) an activity of problematization and disentanglement of the socio-material traits of the encounters between the students and a social media platform ( Instagram ), whose aim was to enable a process of defamiliarization of digital practices, spaces and actants; b) a speculative, artistic, bodily phase of technological reclaiming, in which students were invited to materially reimagine the platform using the collage technique. After presenting the educational design of such an experience, we discuss its enactment in schools through an experiment in sociological fictional writing (Hrastinski, 2025 ). The workshops and related fictions will be used to show how conceiving digital literacy through a relational ontology (DeLanda, 2016 ), a sym-poietic rationality (Haraway, 2016 ) and a more-than-human notion of agency (Code, 2025 , Jiang et al., 2024) enables the design of digital literacy education experiences which escape from the risks of technological or sociological determinism. Such a mode of design, it is argued, creates the conditions of possibility for the students to engage in postdigital literacy events and practices (Bhatt, 2023 ) which are also processes of experimental reassembling (Authors, 2025 ) and educational autonomous subjectivation (Biesta, 2015; Ball, 2019 ). We will show how, in our case, the workshops have opened possibilities for the enactment of a other spaces of education (Foucault, 1986 ), which we understand as sites open to multiple forms of negotiation, discovery and play (McDougall et al., 2018 ), particularly suited to enable generative forms of more-than-human engagement with digital and others literacies. In replying to this special issue question on how to design for literacy in a postdigital world, we will argue that taking inspiration from a relational, sym-poietic and more-than-human perspective allows to move beyond the anthropocentric and intellectualist bias in well-known designs for digital literacy education, opening the room for more inclusive, embodied, materially focused and ecological human-non-human educational designs. Escaping from the temptation to transform literacy education into the umpteenth attempt to establish control over the world, these designs make the most of education as an open (indeterminate) process, a site of autonomous subjectivation and new beginnings (Biesta, 2015), originated in the coming together of heterogeneous entities in the assemblages in which literacy is enacted. Towards a postdigital design for critical digital literacy development In contemporary educational debates and education policy agendas, digital literacy acts as a powerful device which at the same time organizes discursive elaboration, normative action and educational intervention ‘in response to the increasing digitalization of everyday life’ (Pangrazio and Sefton-Green, 2021, p. 1). Digital literacy is central in informing education policies and programmes which focus on educating about digital media use and structures, often framed within a political ethos which points to the nexus between the development of digital literacy and digital citizenship and rights in contemporary societies. Yet, across such a dispersion of discourses and educational interventions, it is possible to observe two kinds of regularities. First, the pervasive recurrence of an instrumental and cognitive-based approach to literacy development, and related pedagogical strategies aimed at individual and functionalist empowerment. Second, an increasing centrality assumed by a critical approach to digital literacy, which equates literacy to the critical capacity “to analyze, critique, and transform the norms, rule systems, and practices governing” digital media communication in everyday life (Falgren Christensen et al., 2025 ). Such an approach reinstates the political into the discourse concerning digital literacy, reconnecting the latter to issues of social justice and digital citizenship rights. Interestingly, while resulting in the enactment of distinctive kinds of educational rationalities and pragmatics, both views tend to share some ontological and spatio-temporal assumptions about literacy and agency. Ontologically, they rely on an anthropocentric and dichotomic mode of thinking about the world, which encapsulates the possibilities for thinking and acting about digital literacy in the space delimited by two paradoxical movements: the oscillation between social or technological determinism and the switch between a scenario where the humans succeed in mastering a machine or it is the machine which alienates the human. In terms of rationality, they both end up enacting a functionalist and teleological temporality, dominated by the imperatives of problem-solving, effectiveness and technical mastering, within which (human) agency is conceived as an individual endeavour of intervention, mastering and control. These ontological assumptions and related rationalities promote the design of digital literacy development experiences within the framework of learnification (Biesta, 2015), that is a disciplinary educational rationality which is instructional and acquisitive and which translates individual empowerment into the awareness of predetermined meanings. Notably, the combination of these three traits denies and suppresses the diversity of the resources for meaning-making (Campbell and Olteanu, 2024 ) in digital literacy practices and digital literacy education. Within this paradigm, students are reduced either to masters of technological tools or victims of media manipulation (Buckingham, 2019 ), and literacy is flattened into a set of predetermined, quantifiable and standardized competencies. To overcome those limitations and the constraints they produce on the educational imagination which nurtures the design of activities for digital literacy development, we argue for the opportunity to embrace a postdigital perspective, as a way to revitalise a critical take on design for digital literacy development. Such a revitalisation, in our perspective, involves recasting critical literacy practice as a problematization of what we are, do and think which unfolds through entanglements of humans and technologies. To put it in other words, we advocate for an understanding of critical digital literacy development as “an immanent, [socio-]technical form of critique”, tied to emergent and distributed heterogenous literacies and forms of agency (Pangrazio, 2016, p. 167). Ontologically, a postdigital perspective invites, in our reading, to rethink the problem of literacy through a relational approach, that is in a non-dichotomic and non-reductionist fashion. This means to recognize that literacies are generated and achieve significance in a relational and distributed manner as a consequence of ordering struggles among heterogeneous entities in a perennial state of becoming. In such a perspective, literacies are not technical skills to be achieved, neither are they standards or normative backdrops against which educational literacy development activities have to take place. Rather, they are dynamic and continuously unfolding and manifesting in situated agential forms. They are “heterogeneous and differentially enacted compositions [...] that are made, produced, and (de-)stabilized in and through relationships, exchanges, and interactions” (Decuypere et al. 2022 , 872). Developing a critical digital literacy means, in this perspective, to disentangle the nuances of the ethical and socio-material dimensions of human-machine agencements, going beyond “enchanted assumptions” regarding technologies, and trying to “highlight the significance of the interconnected and dynamic interactions” in sociodigital encounters (Jiang et al. 2024, 923). In terms of rationality, a postdigital approach invites the design of critical digital literacy development to discard any anthropocentric functionalist and teleological endeavour in favor of a compostist logic of sym-poiesis (Haraway, 2016 , p. 32). Following Haraway ( 2016 ), we understand here sym-poiesis as an ongoing activity of becoming-with and unbecoming-with, as a form of multispecies flourishing. This means to think about literacy development as an activity involving the making of a common world, the relational building-with of human and non human collectives along inventive connective lines. To put it in other words, designing for literacy development means to enact practices for educating to coexist in the present through connecting and caring, rather than enacting acquisitive practices of categorization, classification and functionalization. Agency here becomes an act of perennial translation, of converting entities, of making similar while retaining difference, it is also betrayal, of origins and of solidity, a practice which is always a displacement of alternative possibilities (Latour, 2014 ). Educationally, in such a frame literacy education assumes a distinctive meaning, which we summarize in the notion of experimental reassembling . Critical digital literacy education, here, becomes a ‘limit experience’ (Foucault, 1997 ), a practice that is designed to distance humans and non humans agencements from themselves, to produce folds which allow the exploration of possibilities that are alien to what are comfortable, familiar, and commonplace ways of thinking and acting about sociodigital encounters, making the normal unnecessary and engaging productively with the world. Education for digital literacy development becomes, in this perspective, a ‘dangerous but valuable’ way for staying with digital technologies in education, a promising experimental work of composing and decomposing, engaging and becoming made by sympoietic co-laborers that take part in loosely designed educational agencements. To use the words of Geert Biesta (2015), out of any form of learnification, designing for critical digital literacy development becomes here an attempt to fully value the openness and unpredictability of education as a process of subjectivation, that is a process which creates the conditions for the making of the «subject-ness» of those who are invited to become ‘literate’, for their emancipation and freedom, and for the clearing of the responsibility that comes with such freedom. Rather than being a disciplinary or modulative endeavour (Deleuze, 1990 ), literacy education is asked here to tackle the challenge of making possible the emergence of inflection points “through a relentless work of educational weak composition and re-composition between the human and the artificial” (Authors, 2025 ), inviting both the human and the non-human to move away from prior commitments to create new trajectories which imagine and explore “more open, just, and sustainable futures” (Hayles 2017, p. 205). Designing a (post)digital literacy workshop: an art-based and speculative methodology In this section we show how our reconceptualization of postdigital literacy unfolds through the design and the realization of a series of art-based media education and digital literacy workshops. We also discuss sociological fiction as the generative resource we used to interpret meanings emerged from this experience. The workshops – “ Reinventing Instagram ” – took place from March to April 2025. During each meeting (six in total) one class from the third year of a low-secondary school and one from the first year of high school were brought together, along with their respective teachers. Each group took part in two sessions, held one week apart. During the first session, students engaged in an activity of guided navigation of the Instagram platform, inspired by the walkthrough technique (Light et al., 2018 ), and aimed at problematizing their daily encounters with the social media platform. To facilitate this navigation, we developed and provided supporting materials: cards with guiding questions to be used by students to help them throughout their exploration (Fig. 1); numbered screenshots of the social media associated with these questions, indicating where to look in order to answer them (Fig. 2 ); a map of the platform to help them orient themselves within it. After the navigation, the students, organized in smaller groups of four or five each, presented and discussed their reflections. Through the guided navigation students disentangled and denormalized selected dimensions of their engagements with the platform – such as practices of self-representation, modes of relating to others, spatio-temporal flows of online experience, and routines of content production and consumption. Moreover, tracing these dimensions back to the platform's material elements and design choices, they practiced in exposing its interfaces and functions as active participants in shaping terms and conditions of interaction. In the second session of the workshop, we invited students to a bodily, speculative reimagination of the platform through collage-making. We proposed them to reflect on the cultural traits embedded in the platform and emerged through guided navigation, as well as on material elements through which those were dispatched, and materially reimagine them – hence reimagining the platform. For the collage activity each group was provided with a poster board where we drew the outline of a smartphone, so they could work within the format of an interface (Fig. 3 ); a selection of magazines and illustrated books to cut from freely; and scissors, glue, adhesive tape, and various types of coloring materials (Fig. 4). In drawing on collage, we build on work recognizing it as a fruitful technique to support several forms of fieldwork, valuing cultural criticism and enabling the production of multivoiced texts (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994 ). We extend this idea endorsing collage as a site where the distribution of agency across human and nonhuman actors becomes visible, and where matter performs its own vitality (Bennett, 2020 ). Overall, the workshop draws upon art-based education as a precious classroom resource to spatialise, voice, and process complex affective – both embodied and cognitive (Massumi, 1995 ) – students’ responses to interactions with technology. While the walkthrough allows students to problematize the platform's presumed neutrality, decoding meanings embedded in its affordances, art practice helps to rematerialize the cultural discourses that act through these constructs (Matthews, 2023 ), and, by reimagining those, offer opportunities to reimagine technology: imagination, in this perspective, is a resource for reclaiming spaces of assertion, refusal and negotiation within technological interfaces, functions and algorithmic processes. Drawing on art-based and speculative methods, moreover, we grounded the design of our workshop in the recognition that knowledge production involves a plurality of understandings and is entrenched in a crowded power field - thereby attempting to revitalise digital literacy by facilitating the emergence of nondominant modes of knowing (De Rijke, 2024 ). The decision to generate our data through art-based techniques – acknowledging and embracing their inherent lack of standardization and controllability – was linked to the selection of the epistemic resources we mobilized for interpreting such data. Here, we opted for a sociological fictional approach (Hrastinski, 2025 ), addressing fiction as a creative and critical method to problematize the minutiae of classroom ordinariness. The writing of a fictional case study can thus be understood as an exercise in imagination and critique which is bound to empirical data – a narrative activity that unfolds in the generative tension between the accumulation of worldly situated elements and the attempt to displace them in an effort of denormalization. Sociological fictions vary in their degree of inventiveness or groundedness in empirical data (Hrastinski, 2025 ). In our case, the fiction is strongly informed by our empirical experience: the process of fictionalization largely consisted of gathering elements from the six sessions and weaving them into a single narrative, combining relevant fragments into what might itself be described as a kind of collage. To this end, each session was recorded and the related discussions were transcribed; then, from these transcriptions, we selected key passages and composed a single story that brings them together. In what follows, therefore, we will present our reflections as they emerged through what we experienced and storified: the fictionalized account of our workshop (from now on: our workshop) offers several entry points into a postdigital perspective on literacy, and opportunities to materialize such reconceptualization through everyday digital literacy enactments. Bringing digital literacy out of technological and social determinism As a literacy event, our workshop is an investment in rethinking literacy through relational ontology, as it foregrounded different patterns of human-nonhuman interactions that challenged dichotomic views and related deterministic assumptions. While unstable and diverse, all those relational patterns were shaped by the distribution of agency within the more-than-human assemblage in place. Human and nonhuman actants carry their own agential propensity – but what matters in the end is the agency of the grouping itself (Bennett, 2020 ). We step into the computer lab, the room assigned to us for today’s session. We greet the students as they return from their break, joking with each other, laughing, some still finishing their snacks. Having this classroom assigned to them fills them with enthusiasm. Accustomed to the small individual desks used in most lessons, they observe the workstations with fascination: each one consists of a desk, higher than the normal ones, a large monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and speakers. In front of each large monitor there are two or three padded chairs with wheels, similar to office chairs. They hurry to occupy their positions, playing around and pretending to use the computers, still switched off. As my colleague begins introducing the activity, I am plugging in my laptop into the smartboard: the first slide suddenly pops on the screen: “ Reinventing Instagram ” the students read out loud. They animate, murmuring, giggling and whispering to each other: they are surprised we are talking about Instagram during class. From the back of the room, Giuseppe shouts: “Why? It’s fine the way it is!”. He looks around, pleased with the laughter of his classmates. His teacher gives him a sharp look, scolding him. We ask him if he is sure about it and go on with our introduction. (...) we lay off the activity we will do together: what we propose is a two-part workshop. Today, we are going to analyse a social media platform. In our next session, we are going to reinvent it. Giuseppe looks at us: he, as well as his classmates, seems intrigued. Our activity begins to unfold – with a pace clearly set by interactions between us, students, teachers, the school's daily organization and the computer lab. As the students enter the room, its material arrangement and its elements are already acting: they orient bodies, generate affection and perform actions. Their role clearly is not that of merely setting the scene or hosting a chain of events, exceeding what is typically labelled as background context or environmental conditions (Bennett, 2020 ). The discovery of the laboratory where the workshop will unfold is generative of enthusiasm and disposition towards a non-instructional and non-instrumentalist form of learning, one expressed through Giuseppe’s provocative, while productive, challenge to our activity: here, he is distancing himself from a narrowed, deterministic view where digital literacy is the development of the ability of domesticating technological tools to avoid the risk of being dominated or manipulated by such tools. This framing, which treats technology as a self-contained force bound to predetermined and controllable effects, and humans as sovereign subjects endowed with structural independence and unconstrained willpower, leads to a problematic equivalence between mastery and literacy – a functionalist, instrumentalist aspiration that clearly does not match Giuseppe’s horizons of expectation towards digital literacy. (...) we ask them how much time they spend on Instagram: two, three, for hours, all day ! – someone answers quite emphatically, with a touch of self-irony. “Yes, we know it’s an addiction, that we’re glued to our phones all day and that we should use them less,” they say, rolling their eyes and seeking the gaze of their teachers. They clearly have heard it all before. (...) “So then,” we ask, “You all (or almost) use Instagram daily. But would you be able to give up Instagram, if asked? Or even your smartphone?”. Shouting and laughing, most of them say that there’s no way , while some think about it: yes, but only for five thousand euros! Vincenzo takes the floor again and, in a serious tone, leaves everyone (including us) silent: “Even if we wanted to give up our smartphones, we need them for our homework. I guess I would still have to do my homework, am I right?”, he says smiling to his teacher, “Giving up my phone for a week would mean not doing homework for a week. We have to see the homework to be able to do it!”. Later throughout our workshop, as we discuss their relationship with social media, students’ exchanges interpret the limits of human control and intention over such a relationship, as well as the plurality of forms this can take and the porousness of its contours. Vincenzo’s provocation, for instance, exposes the entanglement of human will, institutional constraints and material forces in performing a (seemingly) simple individual action, such as giving up a smartphone. Agency here is distributed across a sociotechnical assemblage that includes, but is not limited to, students, devices, platforms and school organizational structures. Control of outcomes, therefore, is always partial, negotiated and temporary. Such a view is based on a complete reframing of how we understand digital literacy and its key aspirations: not the maximization of control and efficiency, but the capacity to participate in the ongoing bargaining that any assemblage demands. To bring digital literacies out of determinism, either technological and social, we designed the workshop around a move towards relational thinking and generalized symmetry. This perspective recognizes a specific form of vitality to bodies and matter (Bennett, 2020 ), and sociomaterial events are understood as arising from a complex interplay between human and nonhuman actants, which constitutes an assembled ontology of beings, entities, and forces (Bennett, 2020 ). Within the assemblage, agency is distributed and engagement in (inter)action always entails transformation. As something is enrolled into the assemblage, it is never simply transferred, but translated – that is, it goes through a process of social and physical displacement as it is drawn into interaction with other elements of the assemblage. As Enrico notes: “It’s about instantaneity…it’s already in the name. Instagram is for sharing your life in the instant you are living it.” Alessio jumps in right away: “But sometimes, when you’re thinking about the photo, you lose the instant. You think about sharing it instead of living it. Maybe to get the perfect shot it takes three hours. It looks like an instant, but it’s not.” Vivian nods: “Sometimes I take tons of shots, adjusting the light, the pose, my hair, so that more people like it. That’s how you get popular.” A swarm of (more or less) murmured “yes” fills the classroom. We ask: “and what does it mean to be popular on Instagram?”. At this question, everyone wants to chime in: being popular means having lots of people watching you – but also commenting, sharing you. “Yeah, but it’s a kind of popularity that’s brief, temporary, fragile,” says Giulia. That’s true, some of her classmates reply, but even if it’s kind of silly, they can’t help caring – it comes naturally. Chiara tries to show the bright side: “But if it inspires other, then the popularity isn’t so shallow. It’s not a bad thing – you’re important if that happens. And it’s nice to inspire others.” Vivian agrees: “You can feel full of attention, admired.” We ask: “So, even less alone?” She thinks about it for a moment: “Yeah, less alone... No, not really less alone. If someone pays attention to me, I notice – but then it passes right away.” The precariousness and impermanence of configurations within the assemblage are brought up by students as they reflect on their interactions with the platform as they produce and share content. Alessio’s observation that chasing the perfect shot can take hours – inflating the instantaneity on which Insta -gram itself is based – reveals the struggling and contradictory temporalities traversing this sociotechnical assemblage. The temporal conditions set up and performed by the platform makes the latter far more than a space where content is hosted and through which it is consumed – rather, it is a complex, living architecture that co-governs terms and modes of interaction. Within this postdigitally rethought literacy framework, the plurality and nonlinearity of configurations within the assemblage is not a problem to be solved but a dimension to be navigated. Rather than building upon prediction and control – and hence orienting students towards acquisition and predetermination – the workshop, as a postdigital literacy practice, was designed to foster relational and situated attentiveness: the capacity to read the dynamics of the assemblage as they unfold, and to adjust to their situated logics rather than resolve them against predetermined aims. This reconceptualization of literacy – one that moves beyond the act or capability of mastering – underpins the workshop's design. It understands literacy as encompassing the cognitive, affective, and material resources students need to navigate the complex assemblage of which they are part, and recognizes a twofold focus as central: first, that all learning and meaning-making is to a certain extent material, involving the use of and response to embodied and environmental affordances and constraints; second, that literacy is always embedded in and shaped by social life, thought, language, and materiality. Postdigital literacy as sympoietic composing Aiming to design a critical digital literacy experience through a postdigital approach, throughout our workshop we discarded the anthropocentric, functionalist rationality and related teleological endeavours of mastery development, embracing instead a compostist logic of sym-poiesis (Haraway, 2016 ). This perspective foregrounds the interconnectedness and dynamism at play in every interaction between humans and nonhumans, rethinking literacy to encompass the ethical and sociomaterial dimensions of human-machine collaboration (Code, 2025 ). Some of them, knowing about the app’s screen-time feature, pull out their phones to check their daily and weekly average. “Whatever, I ignore that feature” says Vivian. Alessio tops it up, fiercely: “I disbanded it! I don’t like being controlled”. Enrico raises his hand, eager to make things clear: “I know what you’re talking about! You are talking about the ‘Your activity’ section. It is a place where you can go if you want to know how much time you spend on Instagram. And you can also set a limit to spend less time on it. But I don’t think” – he continues, nervously looking at Vincenzo – “that the app is controlling you, because you have to decide to set a limit. So maybe it’s more a way of controlling yourself through the app. The app just puts it in front of you, but these are all choices you have to make: if you want a time limit, how much time you want to be able to spend on it, and if you receive a notification when you’ve exceeded it”. “Would you prefer the app to actually prevent you from using it after a certain number of hours, that you have fixed?”, we ask him. “No” Enrico answers, “It would bother me if I could not decide at all, because every day I feel different”. Tommaso, from the raw behind, intervenes: “It is like the warnings on cigarette packs, Instagram tells you to spend less time on it, but at the same time, it makes you spend more”. The class stirs, aroused by the topic. Some get distracted by the word cigarette, mimicking with the pen the act of smoking. We keep discussing this topic with Enrico and his classmates: all seem to agree that what we are dealing with here is a matter of responsibility, and such responsibility is shared between the platform and the user. A first design principle of the workshop concerned the distributed character of agency and the impossibility of total control – whether technological or human. Rather than seeking to overcome this condition, the workshop aimed to equip students with the sensitivity to make the unstableness visible and its distributions navigable. As Enrico reflects on the " Your Activity " platform’s activity section – a space where usage time materializes through statistics and charts and where users are allowed to set their own limits by activating alarms and notifications – what emerges is the value of choice, but also its inherent complexity. While Enrico asserts an investment in self-determination, his reflection simultaneously exposes constraints and contingencies through which such self-determination is co-produced. The grand narrative of the sovereign human subject – crucial in shaping how the Moderns have managed their encounters with others (Latour, 2014 ) – falters: to choose is always to compromise, as agency is shared with other entities of the assemblage. The tension generated through this encounter of agencies draws attention to the details and trivialities of such interaction, exposing the fleetingness of actions and the unpredictability of their outcomes within the assemblage. Simultaneously, another tension arises through Tommaso’s cigarette pack analogy: that between architectures of self-regulation and architectures of engagement, conflicting but coinciding, and complicating routines of accountability between humans and technologies – or between subjects and objects. “Look around,” we say to the students, “just like in a museum, we’ve got artworks hanging on the walls. Now we will walk around the room, looking at them one by one, while each group tells us how they redesigned the app and its interface. (...) The first to speak is again Giuseppe, presenting the interface of Actually Stories , designed with his group: “We were flicking through the magazines, and we ended up with pages about gossip and current events, but also images of nature, animals, ancient art, and history. We tried to decide what type of images to keep, but it was so hard! So, we decided to put together both old stuff – like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci – and current stuff – like L’Isola dei Famosi and Grande Fratello . We did it this way because all the images we took caught our attention, and they made us think that it’s not only important to know what’s happening today, but also what happened in the past, as well as the other way around”. (...) Giuseppe continued “When I worked on the interface, as I had all these different images… I kind of did it… like Pop Art”, Giuseppe told us, “I took different images I found and mixed them together, the new ones with the old ones and the old ones with the new ones. And that is exactly what our social media does too when you use it.” In such an entangled system, faith in individual action is an illusion that serves to set boundaries and define clear roles, and the ability to cooperate with other elements becomes a matter of literacy. Literacy development, in this view, is an act of composing: an activity involving the relational building of a common world, where not all builders are human – it is, in other words, a practice of making kin, of learning to live well with each other by practicing inventive connection (Haraway, 2016 ). While making kinds proceeds through categorization, classification and essentialization, making kin involves establishing relations with entities through connecting and caring. This kind of activity is captured by the second of our workshop, as Giuseppe lets us into the unfolding of his group’s collage activity – where the group must be understood as pluri-ontological, more-than-human grouping. As he retraces the process of making the collage, the sympoietic character of the practice becomes evident. The linear sequence one would expect – first conceptualizing, then materializing – is overturned, as matter actively intervenes in the creative process – one mostly thought as arising from individual will and intention and, above all, as exclusively human. The individual act of making is thus rethought as a collective, scattered yet somehow organic making-with: in other words, “nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic of self-organizing” (Haraway, 2016 , p. 75), but is rather part of a complex, situated, more-than-human system. In this system, which are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising, unpredictable change, information and control are distributed among components. To develop a literacy suited to such a system, we have therefore proposed – and designed the workshop accordingly – to approach literacy as sympoietic: that is, as an engagement with the arrangement of these distributions and with learning how to navigate and negotiate one’s trajectories through them. Critical digital literacy education as experimental re-assembling The design of our workshops as non deterministic acts of sympoietic composing contributed, we argue, to the enactment of a particular kind of educational experience. What follows below is an example of the kind of literacy events we were able to observe during the exhibition phase of our workshops: Before we even reach his group’s poster, Vincenzo, emulating the tone of a TV host and pretending to speak into a microphone, begins his pitch: “Professor, teachers, welcome!” – he pause for a moment, waiting for suspense to grow – “our app is called CrazyGram: the icon is a lion” – he says, pointing at the feline face he cut out from the plastic label of the energy drink he was drinking during the workshop – “and that’s it”, he concludes dramatically quickly. Vincenzo’s classmates laugh, and we laugh with them, but we still ask him to keep going. Vincenzo, with fake resignation, starts reading from his phone, not really trying to hide the screen showing his ChatGPT conversation: “CrazyGram is the app that takes you into the heart of the urban jungle. Where adrenaline, strategy, and speed come together in a unique gaming experience. With CrazyTiger every move counts! Get your tiger ready and let loose in an unforgettable experience…”. Vivian, confused, interrupts her classmate to ask him exactly why the app has that name. “I put it into ChatGPT. I don’t know why it’s called that”, he answers quite condescendingly. But then he continues: “whatever, I can explain it: there’s a lion, it is crazy, therefore… CrazyGram!”. He then keeps going through the poster they made, describing it piece by piece, while his classmates laugh: “So this is the game that’s inside this app, which is basically an app like Instagram but with a game inside. On the Home screen, we put the image of a clothing chain that was in the magazine, and it looks nice, so yeah, you get it. On top there are the people who post stories, this one is Mr. Franco Verdicchio” – he says, pointing at a close-up picture of a man – “who likes stuff, comments, and posts photos to let people know where he is. He has no hair”. Pretending to tap and switch to another screen, he goes through the different photos cut out from one of the travel magazines we had given them. “Here we’re in Venice, here we’re at the Palio di Siena, here we’re in Venice again…” “Thanks, Professor,” he concludes, laughing. “And then we didn’t put anything else because nothing else would fit in the poster you gave us! Can we go out now?” Vincenzo’s pitch could sound a bit as an hectic performance, an ironic and dismissive way to deal with the reimagination of Instagram. Yet, reading in the interstices of what we interpret as a postdigital literacy event, it is possible to identify processes of experimental reassembling and educational autonomous subjectivation, serious educational acts which deserve attention, and exceeds the simple acquisition of critical awareness about technology by a group of humans. The exhibition unfolds here as a playful, expressive and multimodal ‘other’ space where the students, starting from their everyday lived experience, elaborate with and through material and artificial entities (the image on the energy drink can or ChatGPT in our case). The reinvented app is the emerging result of joint authoring, it is generated, assembled and told as a digital-analogic story which presents a mixture of a desirable and undesirable postdigital future scenario. What we can observe here is the enactment of a peculiar mix of dynamic digital and analogic literacy practices: a) curation, as the imagining, editing, writing, drawing and authorship or collecting postdigital content; b) the unfolding of a ‘material-discursive-semiotic assemblings; c) a postdigital storytelling through human-non human collaborative meaning making. As a literacy event, this constitutes a more-than-human act of sense-making and critique of our present through a speculation on possible futures, a critique of contemporary postdigital life environments and some of their key features: the aesthetics of existence focused on utilitarianism and strategic thinking, social acceleration and the will to speed, the spectacularization of social life and the will to visibility, or the pervasiveness of post-panoptic surveillance. Interestingly enough, the ‘otherness’ of such a literacy educational space is marked by its unfolding out of the ordinary languages of formal education and the grammar of the classroom, by its character as multivocal and non-human centric performance where humans and non humans engage in multiple forms of negotiation, discovery and play. Elaborating on apps that ‘take you into the heart of the urban jungle’ or tell ‘actual stories’ that overcome presentification or a linear understanding of our temporality, students become part of a distributed activity of curation and invention that allows the crossing of perceived borders through transformational postdigital encounters and the fashioning of a different and unexpected reality (Bhabha 1994, p. 406). Such an unexpected reality is imbued with ambivalences, ambiguities and contradictions but also imagined as allowing a way out. As the fragments of our fiction discussed in the previous sections also show, the peculiar mix of settings, languages and voices embodied in our workshop design opened a space for generative forms of more-than-human engagement with digital and other literacies. It also facilitated the emergence of new knowledge and representations about the hybridity of digital and non-digital spaces which offered several disjunctures to “the hegemony of the digital” (Apperley, Jayemanne, and Nansen 2016, p. 263). This last nexus is exactly what marks from our point of view the educational value of this kind of literacy event. Here a more-than-human sympoietic composing paves the way towards a ‘limit experience’, where humans and non humans agencements distance from themselves (or more precisely from their historical conditions of possibility) and contest the spaces in which they are placed, and folds are produced which allow the exploration of possibilities that are alien to what are comfortable, familiar, and commonplace ways of thinking and acting about sociodigital encounters. If technology loses any fixed power of determination ( but if it inspires others, then popularity isn’t so shallow ), so does the human ( every day I feel different ). Curiosity becomes a distinctive figure of a literacy event that challenges any ‘economy of the Same’ (Ball, 2019 , p. 138) and creates the possibility for processes of autonomous subjectivation. It is exactly the gathering together of heterogeneous entities in the literacy assemblages which makes the normal unnecessary, and makes education as an open (indeterminate) process where the possibility arises for the human-technology assemblages of being addressed and interrupted by the other, whether it is a human or a technical entity (Biesta 2015, 146). Becoming ‘digitally literate’ here involves learning from the fundamental encounter with an heterogenous postdigital other, ​​it entails invitations for a practice of literacy freedom which also clears the responsibility that comes with such freedom. Finally it involves the search for emancipation as the unending fashioning of compostist mode of being with digital technology. Conclusion In this article we situated critical digital literacy into a postdigital perspective, showing what this implies in terms of literacy conceptualization and design. We showed how designing digital literacy education using the principles of relationality, sympoiesis and education-as-subjectivation creates the conditions of possibility for an educational experience where literacy development exceeds both reductionist attempts to foster “how to do’s” and mere aspirations of intellectual participation and/or instrumental maximization. Embracing postdigital literacy as a lived experience where the role of matter and bodies is taken seriously, our proposal for the design of critical digital literacy education draws on art-based methodologies as classroom resource to spatialise students’ affective (both embodied and cognitive) engagements with technologies (Massumi, 1995 , Matthews, 2023 ). In this way, our design foregrounds an aesthetic of recruitment and composing, that is, a strategy of interweaving to recruit new materials, bodies and experiences into emergent and compost-like gatherings or arrangements of play. In this view, literacy is organized around “practices of interfacing that involve increasingly undetermined and diverse sets of bodies, sensations, devices and materials”. It also entails “practices of establishing interfaces that negotiate multiple bodies, devices and objects” (Apperley, Jayemanne and Nansen, 2018 , p. 204). Why such a reconceptualization of design for digital literacy education matters when it comes to the general question about education in a postdigital world? Of course, we can continue with our established understanding(s) of digital literacy education which grants prominence to the human and its capacity to master its relations with the world. Nevertheless, in our reading this would result in remaining encapsulated within the strictures of disciplinary and modulative education to digital literacy development, even when this is framed as a critical endeavour. That is, this would mean to equate digital literacy education to the disciplining of a subject which engages with the endless struggle for the maximization of human control over a multifarious, elusive or threatening technological environment and/or for the optimization of efficiency in the mastering of technological tools. While those modes of literacy development clearly establish a nexus between digital literacy and the constitution of digital citizenship, this points to an anthropocentric and epistemically violent understanding of citizenship. The perspective we experimented with in this article offers a different way to approach the nexus between the politics of design for digital literacy education and citizenship in a postdigital world, where literacy practices are understood as ways to nurture citizenship as a process of becoming which involves heterogeneous agencies in collective and distributed participation and thinking for the common good (Emejulu and McGregor, 2019 ). What emerges is an educational framework for a postdigital citizenship education where the key aspiration for digital literacy development becomes to nurture the capacity to participate in the ongoing bargaining that any postdigital assemblage demands or, better, to set the conditions of possibility for unruled literacy encounters where the aim is to grasp and participate in such an ongoing bargaining. The understanding of citizenship we endorse here is one of an assembled and sympoietic citizenship, based on a conception of ecological engagement and participation with a broader view of agency that includes non-human agents or the material world, including the digital. If such a conception of postdigital citizenship implicates literacy as criticality, that is a shared attitude towards an inquiry into the ethico-political constitution of the (post)digital world (Peters and Besley, 2018 ) and literacy as critically-oriented transformative action (Rapanta, 2023), educating for literacy development becomes a relentless work of composition and re-composition, a work of sympoietic commoning through the exploration of learning human-digital assemblages which strives as ‘compost-like entities’ to remain detached from both the desires for control and/or acquisition. Commoning here refers to the creation of new beginnings (Biesta, 2015) for compost-like entities through a direct engagement with the problems of our postdigital world ‘in common’. Key literacy education activities are here questioning, politicising and troubling common issues which have a relation to the human-digital composing, in spaces which favors “uncanny happenings, affective communal undertakings, uncomfortable becomings” (Collet-Sabet and Ball, 2022, 10). Critical digital literacy education, in a postdigital world, turns into a series of practices of non-predictable implication and transformation, a commoning experience for the construction of assemblages (and subjectivities within the latter) that are antagonistic to functionalist, utilitarian, acquisitive, exploitative relations to the postdigital world. In the perspective we advocate in this article, this sounds as the most promising way to interpret the nexus between digital literacy education and the making of a post-digital citizenship, assuming this endeavour as a condition for the formation of more open, just, and sustainable postdigital futures. Declarations Consent to Participate Participants were involved in a program promoted by the Regional School Office of Campania (Ufficio Scolastico Regionale per la Campania – USR). All participants provided informed consent to take part in the activities and agreed to the use of data generated during the project for research and educational purposes. Human Ethics All procedures involving participants were conducted in accordance with applicable ethical standards. Ethics Approval This study was conducted within the framework an educational program promoted by the Regional School Office (Ufficio Scolastico Regionale per la Campania – USR) of Campania. All procedures were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. Funding Declaration No external funding was received for the development of this study. Author Contribution Both authors contributed equally to all aspects of this work, including research design, manuscript writing, and editing. References Authors (2025) Allaste, AA., Waechter, N. Digital Citizenship and Digital Literacy: Key Themes in Current Debates and Empirical Contributions. JAYS 8, 163–171 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43151-025-00182-1 Apperley, T., Jayemanne, D. & B. Nansen (2018), Postdigital Literacies: Materiality, Mobility and the Aesthetics of Recruitment, In Literacy, Media, Technology: Past, Present and Future , edited by B. Parry, C. Burnett and G. Merchant. London: Bloomsbury. Ball, S. J. (2019). A horizon of freedom: Using Foucault to think differently about education and learning. Power and education , 11(2), 132–144. Bennett, J. (2020). 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Diacritics , 16(1), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648 Foucault, M. (1997). What is enlightenment? In Rabinow P.(ed) Ethics:Subjectivity andTruth. Essential Works 1956–1984,Vol. 1 , New York: New Press, 303–319. Gourlay, L. (2015). Posthuman texts: nonhuman actors, mediators and the digital university. Social Semiotics , 25 (4), 484–500. Haraway, D. J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene , Durham, Duke University Press. Hrastinski, S. (2025). Fiction in research: The case of education fiction. Policy Futures in Education , 23 (8), 1431–1445. Kranzberg, M. (1986). Technology and history:" Kranzberg's Laws". Technology and culture , 27 (3), 544–560. Latour, B. (2014). Another way to compose the common world. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory , 4(1), 301–307. Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New media & society , 20 (3), 881–900. Macgilchrist, F., Jarke, J., Allert, H. et al. (2024). Design Beyond Design Thinking: Designing Postdigital Futures when Weaving Worlds with Others. Postdigit Sci Educ 6, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00447-z Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural critique , (31), 83–109. Matthews, M. (2023). Arts methods for the self-representation of undergraduate students: sensory transitions into university cultures . Routledge. McDougall, J., Readman, M. & P. Wilkinson (2018) The uses of (digital) literacy, Learning, Media and Technology , 43:3, 263–279, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2018.1462206 Pangrazio, L., Sefton-Green, J. Digital Rights, Digital Citizenship and Digital Literacy: What’s the Difference?. J. New Approaches Educ. Res. 10, 15–27 (2021). https://doi.org/10.7821/naer.2021.1.616 Peters, M.A. & Besley, T. (2018). Critical Philosophy of the Postdigital. Postdigital Science and Education . Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0004-9 . Rapanta Wuyckens, G., Landry, N., & Fastrez, P. (2022). Untangling media literacy, information literacy, and digital literacy: A systematic meta-review of core concepts in media education. Journal of Media Literacy Education , 14(1), 168–182. https://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2022-14-1-12 Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. Cite Share Download PDF Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. We do this by developing innovative software and high quality services for the global research community. Our growing team is made up of researchers and industry professionals working together to solve the most critical problems facing scientific publishing. Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-9291705","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Research Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":624487261,"identity":"6b133ea9-146b-4d29-9bfa-97ba0f5f6c42","order_by":0,"name":"Sara Pastore","email":"data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAZAAAAAyAQMAAABI0h/eAAAABlBMVEX///8AAABVwtN+AAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAA4UlEQVRIiWNgGAWjYNCDDwwMPCD6AFGqQUoZZ8C0EKUHpJSZB8bDp0W+/ezDD4w77Ozt2XsfPrZtuyNjzn6A8fAHPFoMzqQbSzCeSU7s4TlubJzb9ozHsicBv8MMGNIYJBjbmBN4JNLYpHPbDvMYHCCgRb7/GfMPxrZ6e6AW9t+WIC3nHxDw/o00NqAthxl7gLYwM4K03CDksBvP2CwSzxxP7DlzjFmy5xxIy8OGA2fwOiyN+cbHHdX27O1tjB9+lB22NziffPhDBT6HgUBiAwqXsQGrKpLVjIJRMApGwQgGAJddTf92uzrTAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC","orcid":"","institution":"University of Naples Federico II","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Sara","middleName":"","lastName":"Pastore","suffix":""},{"id":624487264,"identity":"6be7eae0-0d18-4d95-8e75-1a6108569405","order_by":1,"name":"Emiliano Grimaldi","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"University of Naples Federico II","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Emiliano","middleName":"","lastName":"Grimaldi","suffix":""}],"badges":[],"createdAt":"2026-04-01 12:10:26","currentVersionCode":1,"declarations":"","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-9291705/v1","doiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9291705/v1","draftVersion":[],"editorialEvents":[],"editorialNote":"","failedWorkflow":false,"files":[{"id":107358477,"identity":"fd375f3f-9158-43ac-9f1f-5a52680b1bca","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-04-20 17:33:32","extension":"png","order_by":1,"title":"Figure 1","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":61429,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePopularity card and Control strategies card (Italian). The first card interrogates students regarding what it means to be popular on Instagram, and displays related interface icons: general notifications, direct message notifications, and like notifications. The second card asks students to reflect on the ways the platform makes available to the students to exercise their control over it, as well as over themselves\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Picture1.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-9291705/v1/ff516e96e3b22c6926c06a8d.png"},{"id":107486610,"identity":"1b86581a-32fb-4d43-99d0-ff867e84e867","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-04-22 02:38:32","extension":"png","order_by":2,"title":"Figure 2","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":259347,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eScreenshots of Instagram sections “Settings and activity”; screenshot of the \"Time management\" function, where users are provided with visual rendering of time spent (on a weekly/daily basis) and options for setting daily limits.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"2.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-9291705/v1/5985773344a747fd84b13b77.png"},{"id":107358479,"identity":"9134d954-6db0-4374-b192-97c9d8a74518","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-04-20 17:33:32","extension":"jpg","order_by":3,"title":"Figure 3","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":24963,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eStudents designing the new Instagram interface.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Picture3.jpg","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-9291705/v1/847e128ea58f53ecd36f4834.jpg"},{"id":107358478,"identity":"2388d12d-5fbb-4ae7-889b-8bf7abacb623","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-04-20 17:33:32","extension":"jpg","order_by":4,"title":"Figure 4","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":39528,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eStudents engaging in collage activity.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Picture4.jpg","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-9291705/v1/9ee69c7a3be1121c64d6df10.jpg"},{"id":107488446,"identity":"d769294a-260c-4330-94ce-f8e0a5f7cd19","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-04-22 02:44:49","extension":"pdf","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":609934,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"manuscript.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-9291705/v1/3f240a27-7bff-473e-a018-0d8bb92ffed5.pdf"}],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"\u003cp\u003ePostdigital design for critical digital literacy education. Relationality, sympoiesis and experimental re-assembling \u003c/p\u003e","fulltext":[{"header":"Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003eRecent developments in digital technologies, including AI, have rehearsed academic, policy and public debates on digital literacy, intended comprehensively as an evolving set of skills and practices with implications for the development of informed digital citizenship in contemporary societies (Allaste and Waechter, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR2\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e). Relatedly, educators and educational institutions are urged to design and provide learners with opportunities to develop digital literacy, framed as an activity of \u0026ldquo;knowledge assembly\u0026rdquo; and alternatively conceptualized as \u0026ldquo;mastery and operational proficiency, or evaluation and critique\u0026rdquo; (Pangrazio and Sefton-Green, 2021, p. 20).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDespite the plurality of meanings and definitions associated with the notion of digital literacy in institutional/policy frameworks and contemporary debates (Wuyckens et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR33\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e; Jandrić and Hayes, 2025), in educational practice it is recognisable the dominance of an instrumental and cognitive-based framing of literacy development (Bhatt, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). Such a framing is mirrored in the articulation of pedagogical strategies which assume digital literacy as an individual form of action and promote a range of pragmatically oriented approaches designed to, first and foremost, prepare young people for engagement in digital environments (Emejulu and McGregor, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). In this context, developing digital literacy is equated to the enhancement of students\u0026rsquo; knowledge or their \u0026ldquo;empowerment\u0026rdquo; in the navigation of the digital world \u0026ndash; an equation that often results in an unproductive dichotomous risk/opportunity approach (Garavaglia and Petti, 2025, 4).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn contrast to that, an increasing number of scholars and educators in the field of digital literacy have engaged with new conceptualizations and experimented with different modes of designing in what is understood as a post-digital world, one where we can observe a profound entrenchment of digital technologies into essentially all areas of life (Jandric, 2019). Conceptually, this means to combine a semiotic and materialist approach to frame literacy as practice and to recognize \u0026ldquo;the significance of the material objects and technologies\u0026rdquo; in shaping literacy practices, while at the same time considering technology \u0026ldquo;as one component of a larger literacy assemblage where both human agency and subjectivity play a critical role in forms of mutual co-creating of texts and technology\u0026rdquo; (Bhatt, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e, p. 3). As Falgren Christensen et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e) suggest, this involves a set of distinctive design moves. First, it calls to overcome a conception of literacy development as fostering \u0026ldquo;\u003cem\u003ehow to do\u0026rsquo;\u003c/em\u003e(s)\u0026rdquo; or merely \u0026ldquo;intellectual participation\u0026rdquo;, while fully embracing the idea to design and enact educational experiences which assume that (postdigital) literacy \u0026ldquo;is about lived experiences\u0026rdquo;. Second, it requires to take seriously \u0026lsquo;the role of the material artefacts\u0026rsquo; (Gourlay, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e, p. 485), the bodily incorporated understandings of practices in the development of literacies, including the digital one. Third, in terms of educational design, this involves balancing the foregrounding of learners\u0026rsquo; intellectual development with an equal and symmetric emphasis on the use of \u0026ldquo;the material and bodily prerequisites and instantiations of literacy\u0026rdquo; (Falgren Christensen et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e, p. 8).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn this article we intend to contribute to this debate, both at the conceptual and design level, working at the crossroads between a critical approach that problematizes knowledge, power and authority in everyday life literacy practices and a postdigital take on digital literacy education.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAt the conceptual level, we endorse a postdigital perspective on literacy, joining those authors who emphasize the need to rethink literacy practices as entanglements of humans and technologies and adopt a view of agency as emergent and distributed (Bennett, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). More specifically, we repurpose the idea of critical digital literacy through the lens of postdigital approaches (Jandric, 2019): through this combination we aim to enable a non-dichotomic and non-reductionist understanding of critical digital literacy (or literacies), attentive to the multiple materialities, forces and agencies entangled in sociodigital encounters. In this vein, we present our distinctive understanding of a critical postdigital literacy, unravelling its ontological underpinnings, the kind of spatial and temporal rationality it conveys, the way in which agency is conceived and, finally, what meaning literacy education assumes in such a frame.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eRelatedly, at the design level, we intend to show how such a conceptualization enables a particular kind of design for digital literacy practices, that values the diversity of the roles of actors (human and non-human) and aesthetics that (could) participate in learners\u0026rsquo; development of literacy. To do so, we present an experience in the design and realization of a series of art-based media education and digital literacy workshops. Students engaged in a socio-material, bodily and aesthetics practice of digital literacy, which unfolded in two phases: a) an activity of problematization and disentanglement of the socio-material traits of the encounters between the students and a social media platform (\u003cem\u003eInstagram\u003c/em\u003e), whose aim was to enable a process of defamiliarization of digital practices, spaces and actants; b) a speculative, artistic, bodily phase of technological reclaiming, in which students were invited to materially reimagine the platform using the collage technique.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAfter presenting the educational design of such an experience, we discuss its enactment in schools through an experiment in sociological fictional writing (Hrastinski, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e). The workshops and related fictions will be used to show how conceiving digital literacy through a relational ontology (DeLanda, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e), a sym-poietic rationality (Haraway, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e) and a more-than-human notion of agency (Code, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e, Jiang et al., 2024) enables the design of digital literacy education experiences which escape from the risks of technological or sociological determinism. Such a mode of design, it is argued, creates the conditions of possibility for the students to engage in postdigital literacy events and practices (Bhatt, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) which are also processes of experimental reassembling (Authors, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e) and educational autonomous subjectivation (Biesta, 2015; Ball, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR4\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). We will show how, in our case, the workshops have opened possibilities for the enactment of a \u003cem\u003eother spaces of education\u003c/em\u003e (Foucault, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR18\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1986\u003c/span\u003e), which we understand as sites open to multiple forms of negotiation, discovery and play (McDougall et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR29\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e), particularly suited to enable generative forms of more-than-human engagement with digital and others literacies. In replying to this special issue question on how to design for literacy in a postdigital world, we will argue that taking inspiration from a relational, sym-poietic and more-than-human perspective allows to move beyond the anthropocentric and intellectualist bias in well-known designs for digital literacy education, opening the room for more inclusive, embodied, materially focused and ecological human-non-human educational designs. Escaping from the temptation to transform literacy education into the umpteenth attempt to establish control over the world, these designs make the most of education as an open (indeterminate) process, a site of autonomous subjectivation and new beginnings (Biesta, 2015), originated in the coming together of heterogeneous entities in the assemblages in which literacy is enacted.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Towards a postdigital design for critical digital literacy development","content":"\u003cp\u003eIn contemporary educational debates and education policy agendas, digital literacy acts as a powerful device which at the same time organizes discursive elaboration, normative action and educational intervention \u0026lsquo;in response to the increasing digitalization of everyday life\u0026rsquo; (Pangrazio and Sefton-Green, 2021, p. 1). Digital literacy is central in informing education policies and programmes which focus on educating about digital media use and structures, often framed within a political ethos which points to the nexus between the development of digital literacy and digital citizenship and rights in contemporary societies. Yet, across such a dispersion of discourses and educational interventions, it is possible to observe two kinds of regularities. First, the pervasive recurrence of an instrumental and cognitive-based approach to literacy development, and related pedagogical strategies aimed at individual and functionalist empowerment. Second, an increasing centrality assumed by a critical approach to digital literacy, which equates literacy to the critical capacity \u0026ldquo;to analyze, critique, and transform the norms, rule systems, and practices governing\u0026rdquo; digital media communication in everyday life (Falgren Christensen et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e). Such an approach reinstates the political into the discourse concerning digital literacy, reconnecting the latter to issues of social justice and digital citizenship rights.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInterestingly, while resulting in the enactment of distinctive kinds of educational rationalities and pragmatics, both views tend to share some ontological and spatio-temporal assumptions about literacy and agency. Ontologically, they rely on an anthropocentric and dichotomic mode of thinking about the world, which encapsulates the possibilities for thinking and acting about digital literacy in the space delimited by two paradoxical movements: the oscillation between social or technological determinism and the switch between a scenario where the humans succeed in mastering a machine or it is the machine which alienates the human. In terms of rationality, they both end up enacting a functionalist and teleological temporality, dominated by the imperatives of problem-solving, effectiveness and technical mastering, within which (human) agency is conceived as an individual endeavour of intervention, mastering and control. These ontological assumptions and related rationalities promote the design of digital literacy development experiences within the framework of learnification (Biesta, 2015), that is a disciplinary educational rationality which is instructional and acquisitive and which translates individual empowerment into the awareness of predetermined meanings. Notably, the combination of these three traits denies and suppresses the diversity of the resources for meaning-making (Campbell and Olteanu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) in digital literacy practices and digital literacy education. Within this paradigm, students are reduced either to masters of technological tools or victims of media manipulation (Buckingham, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e), and literacy is flattened into a set of predetermined, quantifiable and standardized competencies.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo overcome those limitations and the constraints they produce on the educational imagination which nurtures the design of activities for digital literacy development, we argue for the opportunity to embrace a postdigital perspective, as a way to revitalise a critical take on design for digital literacy development. Such a revitalisation, in our perspective, involves recasting critical literacy practice as a problematization of what we are, do and think which unfolds through entanglements of humans and technologies. To put it in other words, we advocate for an understanding of critical digital literacy development as \u0026ldquo;an immanent, [socio-]technical form of critique\u0026rdquo;, tied to emergent and distributed heterogenous literacies and forms of agency (Pangrazio, 2016, p. 167).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOntologically, a postdigital perspective invites, in our reading, to rethink the problem of literacy through a relational approach, that is in a non-dichotomic and non-reductionist fashion. This means to recognize that literacies are generated and achieve significance in a relational and distributed manner as a consequence of ordering struggles among heterogeneous entities in a perennial state of becoming. In such a perspective, literacies are not technical skills to be achieved, neither are they standards or normative backdrops against which educational literacy development activities have to take place. Rather, they are dynamic and continuously unfolding and manifesting in situated agential forms. They are \u0026ldquo;heterogeneous and differentially enacted compositions [...] that are made, produced, and (de-)stabilized in and through relationships, exchanges, and interactions\u0026rdquo; (Decuypere et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR13\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e, 872). Developing a critical digital literacy means, in this perspective, to disentangle the nuances of the ethical and socio-material dimensions of human-machine agencements, going beyond \u0026ldquo;enchanted assumptions\u0026rdquo; regarding technologies, and trying to \u0026ldquo;highlight the significance of the interconnected and dynamic interactions\u0026rdquo; in sociodigital encounters (Jiang et al. 2024, 923).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn terms of rationality, a postdigital approach invites the design of critical digital literacy development to discard any anthropocentric functionalist and teleological endeavour in favor of a \u003cem\u003ecompostist\u003c/em\u003e logic of \u003cem\u003esym-poiesis\u003c/em\u003e (Haraway, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e, p. 32). Following Haraway (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e), we understand here sym-poiesis as an ongoing activity of becoming-with and unbecoming-with, as a form of multispecies flourishing. This means to think about literacy development as an activity involving the making of a common world, the relational building-with of human and non human collectives along inventive connective lines. To put it in other words, designing for literacy development means to enact practices for educating to coexist in the present through connecting and caring, rather than enacting acquisitive practices of categorization, classification and functionalization. Agency here becomes an act of perennial translation, of converting entities, of making similar while retaining difference, it is also betrayal, of origins and of solidity, a practice which is always a displacement of alternative possibilities (Latour, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEducationally, in such a frame literacy education assumes a distinctive meaning, which we summarize in the notion of \u003cem\u003eexperimental reassembling\u003c/em\u003e. Critical digital literacy education, here, becomes a \u0026lsquo;limit experience\u0026rsquo; (Foucault, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR19\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1997\u003c/span\u003e), a practice that is designed to distance humans and non humans agencements from themselves, to produce folds which allow the exploration of possibilities that are alien to what are comfortable, familiar, and commonplace ways of thinking and acting about sociodigital encounters, making the normal unnecessary and engaging productively with the world. Education for digital literacy development becomes, in this perspective, a \u0026lsquo;dangerous but valuable\u0026rsquo; way for staying with digital technologies in education, a promising experimental work of composing and decomposing, engaging and becoming made by sympoietic co-laborers that take part in loosely designed educational agencements. To use the words of Geert Biesta (2015), out of any form of learnification, designing for critical digital literacy development becomes here an attempt to fully value the openness and unpredictability of education as a process of subjectivation, that is a process which creates the conditions for the making of the \u0026laquo;subject-ness\u0026raquo; of those who are invited to become \u0026lsquo;literate\u0026rsquo;, for their emancipation and freedom, and for the clearing of the responsibility that comes with such freedom. Rather than being a disciplinary or modulative endeavour (Deleuze, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1990\u003c/span\u003e), literacy education is asked here to tackle the challenge of making possible the emergence of inflection points \u0026ldquo;through a relentless work of educational weak composition and re-composition between the human and the artificial\u0026rdquo; (Authors, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e), inviting both the human and the non-human to move away from prior commitments to create new trajectories which imagine and explore \u0026ldquo;more open, just, and sustainable futures\u0026rdquo; (Hayles 2017, p. 205).\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Designing a (post)digital literacy workshop: an art-based and speculative methodology ","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec3\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eIn this section we show how our reconceptualization of postdigital literacy unfolds through the design and the realization of a series of art-based media education and digital literacy workshops. We also discuss sociological fiction as the generative resource we used to interpret meanings emerged from this experience.\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eThe workshops \u0026ndash; \u0026ldquo;\u003cem\u003eReinventing Instagram\u003c/em\u003e\u0026rdquo; \u0026ndash; took place from March to April 2025. During each meeting (six in total) one class from the third year of a low-secondary school and one from the first year of high school were brought together, along with their respective teachers. Each group took part in two sessions, held one week apart.\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eDuring the first session, students engaged in an activity of guided navigation of the Instagram platform, inspired by the walkthrough technique (Light et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR25\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e), and aimed at problematizing their daily encounters with the social media platform. To facilitate this navigation, we developed and provided supporting materials: cards with guiding questions to be used by students to help them throughout their exploration (Fig. 1); numbered screenshots of the social media associated with these questions, indicating where to look in order to answer them (Fig. \u003cspan refid=\"Fig1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e); a map of the platform to help them orient themselves within it. After the navigation, the students, organized in smaller groups of four or five each, presented and discussed their reflections.\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eThrough the guided navigation students disentangled and denormalized selected dimensions of their engagements with the platform \u0026ndash; such as practices of self-representation, modes of relating to others, spatio-temporal flows of online experience, and routines of content production and consumption. Moreover, tracing these dimensions back to the platform\u0026apos;s material elements and design choices, they practiced in exposing its interfaces and functions as active participants in shaping terms and conditions of interaction.\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eIn the second session of the workshop, we invited students to a bodily, speculative reimagination of the platform through collage-making. We proposed them to reflect on the cultural traits embedded in the platform and emerged through guided navigation, as well as on material elements through which those were dispatched, and materially reimagine them \u0026ndash; hence reimagining the platform.\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eFor the collage activity each group was provided with a poster board where we drew the outline of a smartphone, so they could work within the format of an interface (Fig. \u003cspan refid=\"Fig2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e); a selection of magazines and illustrated books to cut from freely; and scissors, glue, adhesive tape, and various types of coloring materials (Fig. 4). In drawing on collage, we build on work recognizing it as a fruitful technique to support several forms of fieldwork, valuing cultural criticism and enabling the production of multivoiced texts (Denzin and Lincoln, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1994\u003c/span\u003e). We extend this idea endorsing collage as a site where the distribution of agency across human and nonhuman actors becomes visible, and where matter performs its own vitality (Bennett, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eOverall, the workshop draws upon art-based education as a precious classroom resource to spatialise, voice, and process complex affective \u0026ndash; both embodied and cognitive (Massumi, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1995\u003c/span\u003e) \u0026ndash; students\u0026rsquo; responses to interactions with technology. While the walkthrough allows students to problematize the platform\u0026apos;s presumed neutrality, decoding meanings embedded in its affordances, art practice helps to rematerialize the cultural discourses that act through these constructs (Matthews, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e), and, by reimagining those, offer opportunities to reimagine technology: imagination, in this perspective, is a resource for reclaiming spaces of assertion, refusal and negotiation within technological interfaces, functions and algorithmic processes. Drawing on art-based and speculative methods, moreover, we grounded the design of our workshop in the recognition that knowledge production involves a plurality of understandings and is entrenched in a crowded power field - thereby attempting to revitalise digital literacy by facilitating the emergence of nondominant modes of knowing (De Rijke, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eThe decision to generate our data through art-based techniques \u0026ndash; acknowledging and embracing their inherent lack of standardization and controllability \u0026ndash; was linked to the selection of the epistemic resources we mobilized for interpreting such data. Here, we opted for a sociological fictional approach (Hrastinski, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e), addressing fiction as a creative and critical method to problematize the minutiae of classroom ordinariness. The writing of a fictional case study can thus be understood as an exercise in imagination and critique which is bound to empirical data \u0026ndash; a narrative activity that unfolds in the generative tension between the accumulation of worldly situated elements and the attempt to displace them in an effort of denormalization. Sociological fictions vary in their degree of inventiveness or groundedness in empirical data (Hrastinski, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e). In our case, the fiction is strongly informed by our empirical experience: the process of fictionalization largely consisted of gathering elements from the six sessions and weaving them into a single narrative, combining relevant fragments into what might itself be described as a kind of collage. To this end, each session was recorded and the related discussions were transcribed; then, from these transcriptions, we selected key passages and composed a single story that brings them together.\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eIn what follows, therefore, we will present our reflections as they emerged through what we experienced and storified: the fictionalized account of our workshop (from now on: our workshop) offers several entry points into a postdigital perspective on literacy, and opportunities to materialize such reconceptualization through everyday digital literacy enactments.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"Bringing digital literacy out of technological and social determinism","content":"\u003cp\u003eAs a literacy event, our workshop is an investment in rethinking literacy through relational ontology, as it foregrounded different patterns of human-nonhuman interactions that challenged dichotomic views and related deterministic assumptions.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhile unstable and diverse, all those relational patterns were shaped by the distribution of agency within the more-than-human assemblage in place. Human and nonhuman actants carry their own agential propensity \u0026ndash; but what matters in the end is the agency of the grouping itself (Bennett, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e).\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe step into the computer lab, the room assigned to us for today\u0026rsquo;s session. We greet the students as they return from their break, joking with each other, laughing, some still finishing their snacks. Having this classroom assigned to them fills them with enthusiasm. Accustomed to the small individual desks used in most lessons, they observe the workstations with fascination: each one consists of a desk, higher than the normal ones, a large monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and speakers. In front of each large monitor there are two or three padded chairs with wheels, similar to office chairs. They hurry to occupy their positions, playing around and pretending to use the computers, still switched off.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs my colleague begins introducing the activity, I am plugging in my laptop into the smartboard: the first slide suddenly pops on the screen: \u0026ldquo;\u003cem\u003eReinventing Instagram\u003c/em\u003e\u0026rdquo; the students read out loud. They animate, murmuring, giggling and whispering to each other: they are surprised we are talking about Instagram during class. From the back of the room, Giuseppe shouts: \u0026ldquo;Why? It\u0026rsquo;s fine the way it is!\u0026rdquo;. He looks around, pleased with the laughter of his classmates. His teacher gives him a sharp look, scolding him. We ask him if he is sure about it and go on with our introduction.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e(...) we lay off the activity we will do together: what we propose is a two-part workshop. Today, we are going to analyse a social media platform. In our next session, we are going to reinvent it. Giuseppe looks at us: he, as well as his classmates, seems intrigued.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOur activity begins to unfold \u0026ndash; with a pace clearly set by interactions between us, students, teachers, the school's daily organization and the computer lab. As the students enter the room, its material arrangement and its elements are already acting: they orient bodies, generate affection and perform actions. Their role clearly is not that of merely setting the scene or hosting a chain of events, exceeding what is typically labelled as background context or environmental conditions (Bennett, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe discovery of the laboratory where the workshop will unfold is generative of enthusiasm and disposition towards a non-instructional and non-instrumentalist form of learning, one expressed through Giuseppe\u0026rsquo;s provocative, while productive, challenge to our activity: here, he is distancing himself from a narrowed, deterministic view where digital literacy is the development of the ability of domesticating technological tools to avoid the risk of being dominated or manipulated by such tools. This framing, which treats technology as a self-contained force bound to predetermined and controllable effects, and humans as sovereign subjects endowed with structural independence and unconstrained willpower, leads to a problematic equivalence between mastery and literacy \u0026ndash; a functionalist, instrumentalist aspiration that clearly does not match Giuseppe\u0026rsquo;s horizons of expectation towards digital literacy.\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e(...) we ask them how much time they spend on Instagram: \u003cem\u003etwo, three, for hours, all day\u003c/em\u003e! \u0026ndash; someone answers quite emphatically, with a touch of self-irony. \u0026ldquo;Yes, we know it\u0026rsquo;s an addiction, that we\u0026rsquo;re glued to our phones all day and that we should use them less,\u0026rdquo; they say, rolling their eyes and seeking the gaze of their teachers. They clearly have heard it all before.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e(...)\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;So then,\u0026rdquo; we ask, \u0026ldquo;You all (or almost) use Instagram daily. But would you be able to give up Instagram, if asked? Or even your smartphone?\u0026rdquo;. Shouting and laughing, most of them say that \u003cem\u003ethere\u0026rsquo;s no way\u003c/em\u003e, while some think about it: yes, \u003cem\u003ebut only for five thousand euros!\u003c/em\u003e Vincenzo takes the floor again and, in a serious tone, leaves everyone (including us) silent: \u0026ldquo;Even if we wanted to give up our smartphones, we need them for our homework. I guess I would still have to do my homework, am I right?\u0026rdquo;, he says smiling to his teacher, \u0026ldquo;Giving up my phone for a week would mean not doing homework for a week. We have to see the homework to be able to do it!\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eLater throughout our workshop, as we discuss their relationship with social media, students\u0026rsquo; exchanges interpret the limits of human control and intention over such a relationship, as well as the plurality of forms this can take and the porousness of its contours. Vincenzo\u0026rsquo;s provocation, for instance, exposes the entanglement of human will, institutional constraints and material forces in performing a (seemingly) simple individual action, such as giving up a smartphone. Agency here is distributed across a sociotechnical assemblage that includes, but is not limited to, students, devices, platforms and school organizational structures. Control of outcomes, therefore, is always partial, negotiated and temporary. Such a view is based on a complete reframing of how we understand digital literacy and its key aspirations: not the maximization of control and efficiency, but the capacity to participate in the ongoing bargaining that any assemblage demands.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTo bring digital literacies out of determinism, either technological and social, we designed the workshop around a move towards relational thinking and generalized symmetry. This perspective recognizes a specific form of vitality to bodies and matter (Bennett, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e), and sociomaterial events are understood as arising from a complex interplay between human and nonhuman actants, which constitutes an assembled ontology of beings, entities, and forces (Bennett, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). Within the assemblage, agency is distributed and engagement in (inter)action always entails transformation. As something is enrolled into the assemblage, it is never simply transferred, but translated \u0026ndash; that is, it goes through a process of social and physical displacement as it is drawn into interaction with other elements of the assemblage.\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs Enrico notes: \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s about instantaneity\u0026hellip;it\u0026rsquo;s already in the name. Instagram is for sharing your life in the instant you are living it.\u0026rdquo; Alessio jumps in right away: \u0026ldquo;But sometimes, when you\u0026rsquo;re thinking about the photo, you lose the instant. You think about sharing it instead of living it. Maybe to get the perfect shot it takes three hours. It looks like an instant, but it\u0026rsquo;s not.\u0026rdquo; Vivian nods: \u0026ldquo;Sometimes I take tons of shots, adjusting the light, the pose, my hair, so that more people like it. That\u0026rsquo;s how you get popular.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA swarm of (more or less) murmured \u0026ldquo;yes\u0026rdquo; fills the classroom. We ask: \u0026ldquo;and what does it mean to be popular on Instagram?\u0026rdquo;. At this question, everyone wants to chime in: being popular means having lots of people watching you \u0026ndash; but also commenting, sharing you. \u0026ldquo;Yeah, but it\u0026rsquo;s a kind of popularity that\u0026rsquo;s brief, temporary, fragile,\u0026rdquo; says Giulia. That\u0026rsquo;s true, some of her classmates reply, but even if it\u0026rsquo;s kind of silly, they can\u0026rsquo;t help caring \u0026ndash; it comes naturally.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChiara tries to show the bright side: \u0026ldquo;But if it inspires other, then the popularity isn\u0026rsquo;t so shallow. It\u0026rsquo;s not a bad thing \u0026ndash; you\u0026rsquo;re important if that happens. And it\u0026rsquo;s nice to inspire others.\u0026rdquo; Vivian agrees: \u0026ldquo;You can feel full of attention, admired.\u0026rdquo; We ask: \u0026ldquo;So, even less alone?\u0026rdquo; She thinks about it for a moment: \u0026ldquo;Yeah, less alone... No, not really less alone. If someone pays attention to me, I notice \u0026ndash; but then it passes right away.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe precariousness and impermanence of configurations within the assemblage are brought up by students as they reflect on their interactions with the platform as they produce and share content. Alessio\u0026rsquo;s observation that chasing the perfect shot can take hours \u0026ndash; inflating the instantaneity on which \u003cem\u003eInsta\u003c/em\u003e-gram itself is based \u0026ndash; reveals the struggling and contradictory temporalities traversing this sociotechnical assemblage.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe temporal conditions set up and performed by the platform makes the latter far more than a space where content is hosted and through which it is consumed \u0026ndash; rather, it is a complex, living architecture that co-governs terms and modes of interaction.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWithin this postdigitally rethought literacy framework, the plurality and nonlinearity of configurations within the assemblage is not a problem to be solved but a dimension to be navigated. Rather than building upon prediction and control \u0026ndash; and hence orienting students towards acquisition and predetermination \u0026ndash; the workshop, as a postdigital literacy practice, was designed to foster relational and situated attentiveness: the capacity to read the dynamics of the assemblage as they unfold, and to adjust to their situated logics rather than resolve them against predetermined aims.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis reconceptualization of literacy \u0026ndash; one that moves beyond the act or capability of mastering \u0026ndash; underpins the workshop's design. It understands literacy as encompassing the cognitive, affective, and material resources students need to navigate the complex assemblage of which they are part, and recognizes a twofold focus as central: first, that all learning and meaning-making is to a certain extent material, involving the use of and response to embodied and environmental affordances and constraints; second, that literacy is always embedded in and shaped by social life, thought, language, and materiality.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Postdigital literacy as sympoietic composing","content":"\u003cp\u003eAiming to design a critical digital literacy experience through a postdigital approach, throughout our workshop we discarded the anthropocentric, functionalist rationality and related teleological endeavours of mastery development, embracing instead a compostist logic of sym-poiesis (Haraway, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). This perspective foregrounds the interconnectedness and dynamism at play in every interaction between humans and nonhumans, rethinking literacy to encompass the ethical and sociomaterial dimensions of human-machine collaboration (Code, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e).\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSome of them, knowing about the app\u0026rsquo;s screen-time feature, pull out their phones to check their daily and weekly average. \u0026ldquo;Whatever, I ignore that feature\u0026rdquo; says Vivian. Alessio tops it up, fiercely: \u0026ldquo;I disbanded it! I don\u0026rsquo;t like being controlled\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEnrico raises his hand, eager to make things clear: \u0026ldquo;I know what you\u0026rsquo;re talking about! You are talking about the \u003cem\u003e\u0026lsquo;Your activity\u0026rsquo;\u003c/em\u003e section. It is a place where you can go if you want to know how much time you spend on Instagram. And you can also set a limit to spend less time on it. But I don\u0026rsquo;t think\u0026rdquo; \u0026ndash; he continues, nervously looking at Vincenzo \u0026ndash; \u0026ldquo;that the app is controlling you, because you have to decide to set a limit. So maybe it\u0026rsquo;s more a way of controlling yourself through the app. The app just puts it in front of you, but these are all choices you have to make: if you want a time limit, how much time you want to be able to spend on it, and if you receive a notification when you\u0026rsquo;ve exceeded it\u0026rdquo;. \u0026ldquo;Would you prefer the app to actually prevent you from using it after a certain number of hours, that you have fixed?\u0026rdquo;, we ask him. \u0026ldquo;No\u0026rdquo; Enrico answers, \u0026ldquo;It would bother me if I could not decide at all, because every day I feel different\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTommaso, from the raw behind, intervenes: \u0026ldquo;It is like the warnings on cigarette packs, Instagram tells you to spend less time on it, but at the same time, it makes you spend more\u0026rdquo;. The class stirs, aroused by the topic. Some get distracted by the word cigarette, mimicking with the pen the act of smoking.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe keep discussing this topic with Enrico and his classmates: all seem to agree that what we are dealing with here is a matter of responsibility, and such responsibility is shared between the platform and the user.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA first design principle of the workshop concerned the distributed character of agency and the impossibility of total control \u0026ndash; whether technological or human. Rather than seeking to overcome this condition, the workshop aimed to equip students with the sensitivity to make the unstableness visible and its distributions navigable.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAs Enrico reflects on the \"\u003cem\u003eYour Activity\u003c/em\u003e\" platform\u0026rsquo;s activity section \u0026ndash; a space where usage time materializes through statistics and charts and where users are allowed to set their own limits by activating alarms and notifications \u0026ndash; what emerges is the value of choice, but also its inherent complexity. While Enrico asserts an investment in self-determination, his reflection simultaneously exposes constraints and contingencies through which such self-determination is co-produced. The grand narrative of the sovereign human subject \u0026ndash; crucial in shaping how the Moderns have managed their encounters with others (Latour, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e) \u0026ndash; falters: to choose is always to compromise, as agency is shared with other entities of the assemblage. The tension generated through this encounter of agencies draws attention to the details and trivialities of such interaction, exposing the fleetingness of actions and the unpredictability of their outcomes within the assemblage. Simultaneously, another tension arises through Tommaso\u0026rsquo;s cigarette pack analogy: that between architectures of self-regulation and architectures of engagement, conflicting but coinciding, and complicating routines of accountability between humans and technologies \u0026ndash; or between subjects and objects.\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Look around,\u0026rdquo; we say to the students, \u0026ldquo;just like in a museum, we\u0026rsquo;ve got artworks hanging on the walls. Now we will walk around the room, looking at them one by one, while each group tells us how they redesigned the app and its interface.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e(...) The first to speak is again Giuseppe, presenting the interface of \u003cem\u003eActually Stories\u003c/em\u003e, designed with his group: \u0026ldquo;We were flicking through the magazines, and we ended up with pages about gossip and current events, but also images of nature, animals, ancient art, and history. We tried to decide what type of images to keep, but it was so hard! So, we decided to put together both old stuff \u0026ndash; like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci \u0026ndash; and current stuff \u0026ndash; like \u003cem\u003eL\u0026rsquo;Isola dei Famosi\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eGrande Fratello\u003c/em\u003e. We did it this way because all the images we took caught our attention, and they made us think that it\u0026rsquo;s not only important to know what\u0026rsquo;s happening today, but also what happened in the past, as well as the other way around\u0026rdquo;. (...) Giuseppe continued \u0026ldquo;When I worked on the interface, as I had all these different images\u0026hellip; I kind of did it\u0026hellip; like Pop Art\u0026rdquo;, Giuseppe told us, \u0026ldquo;I took different images I found and mixed them together, the new ones with the old ones and the old ones with the new ones. And that is exactly what our social media does too when you use it.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn such an entangled system, faith in individual action is an illusion that serves to set boundaries and define clear roles, and the ability to cooperate with other elements becomes a matter of literacy. Literacy development, in this view, is an act of composing: an activity involving the relational building of a common world, where not all builders are human \u0026ndash; it is, in other words, a practice of making kin, of learning to live well with each other by practicing inventive connection (Haraway, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). While making kinds proceeds through categorization, classification and essentialization, making kin involves establishing relations with entities through connecting and caring.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis kind of activity is captured by the second of our workshop, as Giuseppe lets us into the unfolding of his group\u0026rsquo;s collage activity \u0026ndash; where the group must be understood as pluri-ontological, more-than-human grouping. As he retraces the process of making the collage, the sympoietic character of the practice becomes evident. The linear sequence one would expect \u0026ndash; first conceptualizing, then materializing \u0026ndash; is overturned, as matter actively intervenes in the creative process \u0026ndash; one mostly thought as arising from individual will and intention and, above all, as exclusively human.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe individual act of making is thus rethought as a collective, scattered yet somehow organic making-with: in other words, \u0026ldquo;nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic of self-organizing\u0026rdquo; (Haraway, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e, p. 75), but is rather part of a complex, situated, more-than-human system. In this system, which are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising, unpredictable change, information and control are distributed among components. To develop a literacy suited to such a system, we have therefore proposed \u0026ndash; and designed the workshop accordingly \u0026ndash; to approach literacy as sympoietic: that is, as an engagement with the arrangement of these distributions and with learning how to navigate and negotiate one\u0026rsquo;s trajectories through them.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Critical digital literacy education as experimental re-assembling","content":"\u003cp\u003eThe design of our workshops as non deterministic acts of sympoietic composing contributed, we argue, to the enactment of a particular kind of educational experience. What follows below is an example of the kind of literacy events we were able to observe during the exhibition phase of our workshops:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eBefore we even reach his group\u0026rsquo;s poster, Vincenzo, emulating the tone of a TV host and pretending to speak into a microphone, begins his pitch: \u0026ldquo;Professor, teachers, welcome!\u0026rdquo; \u0026ndash; he pause for a moment, waiting for suspense to grow \u0026ndash; \u0026ldquo;our app is called CrazyGram: the icon is a lion\u0026rdquo; \u0026ndash; he says, pointing at the feline face he cut out from the plastic label of the energy drink he was drinking during the workshop \u0026ndash; \u0026ldquo;and that\u0026rsquo;s it\u0026rdquo;, he concludes dramatically quickly.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVincenzo\u0026rsquo;s classmates laugh, and we laugh with them, but we still ask him to keep going. Vincenzo, with fake resignation, starts reading from his phone, not really trying to hide the screen showing his ChatGPT conversation: \u0026ldquo;CrazyGram is the app that takes you into the heart of the urban jungle. Where adrenaline, strategy, and speed come together in a unique gaming experience. With CrazyTiger every move counts! Get your tiger ready and let loose in an unforgettable experience\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVivian, confused, interrupts her classmate to ask him exactly why the app has that name. \u0026ldquo;I put it into ChatGPT. I don\u0026rsquo;t know why it\u0026rsquo;s called that\u0026rdquo;, he answers quite condescendingly. But then he continues: \u0026ldquo;whatever, I can explain it: there\u0026rsquo;s a lion, it is crazy, therefore\u0026hellip; CrazyGram!\u0026rdquo;. He then keeps going through the poster they made, describing it piece by piece, while his classmates laugh: \u0026ldquo;So this is the game that\u0026rsquo;s inside this app, which is basically an app like Instagram but with a game inside. On the Home screen, we put the image of a clothing chain that was in the magazine, and it looks nice, so yeah, you get it. On top there are the people who post stories, this one is Mr. Franco Verdicchio\u0026rdquo; \u0026ndash; he says, pointing at a close-up picture of a man \u0026ndash; \u0026ldquo;who likes stuff, comments, and posts photos to let people know where he is. He has no hair\u0026rdquo;. Pretending to tap and switch to another screen, he goes through the different photos cut out from one of the travel magazines we had given them. \u0026ldquo;Here we\u0026rsquo;re in Venice, here we\u0026rsquo;re at the Palio di Siena, here we\u0026rsquo;re in Venice again\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Thanks, Professor,\u0026rdquo; he concludes, laughing. \u0026ldquo;And then we didn\u0026rsquo;t put anything else because nothing else would fit in the poster you gave us! Can we go out now?\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eVincenzo\u0026rsquo;s pitch could sound a bit as an hectic performance, an ironic and dismissive way to deal with the reimagination of Instagram. Yet, reading in the interstices of what we interpret as a postdigital literacy event, it is possible to identify processes of experimental reassembling and educational autonomous subjectivation, serious educational acts which deserve attention, and exceeds the simple acquisition of critical awareness about technology by a group of humans.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe exhibition unfolds here as a playful, expressive and multimodal \u0026lsquo;other\u0026rsquo; space where the students, starting from their everyday lived experience, elaborate with and through material and artificial entities (the image on the energy drink can or ChatGPT in our case). The reinvented app is the emerging result of joint authoring, it is generated, assembled and told as a digital-analogic story which presents a mixture of a desirable and undesirable postdigital future scenario. What we can observe here is the enactment of a peculiar mix of dynamic digital and analogic literacy practices: a) curation, as the imagining, editing, writing, drawing and authorship or collecting postdigital content; b) the unfolding of a \u0026lsquo;material-discursive-semiotic assemblings; c) a postdigital storytelling through human-non human collaborative meaning making.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAs a literacy event, this constitutes a more-than-human act of sense-making and critique of our present through a speculation on possible futures, a critique of contemporary postdigital life environments and some of their key features: the aesthetics of existence focused on utilitarianism and strategic thinking, social acceleration and the will to speed, the spectacularization of social life and the will to visibility, or the pervasiveness of post-panoptic surveillance. Interestingly enough, the \u0026lsquo;otherness\u0026rsquo; of such a literacy educational space is marked by its unfolding out of the ordinary languages of formal education and the grammar of the classroom, by its character as multivocal and non-human centric performance where humans and non humans engage in multiple forms of negotiation, discovery and play.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eElaborating on apps that \u0026lsquo;take you into the heart of the urban jungle\u0026rsquo; or tell \u0026lsquo;actual stories\u0026rsquo; that overcome presentification or a linear understanding of our temporality, students become part of a distributed activity of curation and invention that allows the crossing of perceived borders through transformational postdigital encounters and the fashioning of a different and unexpected reality (Bhabha 1994, p. 406). Such an unexpected reality is imbued with ambivalences, ambiguities and contradictions but also imagined as allowing a way out.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAs the fragments of our fiction discussed in the previous sections also show, the peculiar mix of settings, languages and voices embodied in our workshop design opened a space for generative forms of more-than-human engagement with digital and other literacies. It also facilitated the emergence of new knowledge and representations about the hybridity of digital and non-digital spaces which offered several disjunctures to \u0026ldquo;the hegemony of the digital\u0026rdquo; (Apperley, Jayemanne, and Nansen 2016, p. 263). This last nexus is exactly what marks from our point of view the educational value of this kind of literacy event. Here a more-than-human sympoietic composing paves the way towards a \u0026lsquo;limit experience\u0026rsquo;, where humans and non humans agencements distance from themselves (or more precisely from their historical conditions of possibility) and contest the spaces in which they are placed, and folds are produced which allow the exploration of possibilities that are alien to what are comfortable, familiar, and commonplace ways of thinking and acting about sociodigital encounters. If technology loses any fixed power of determination (\u003cem\u003ebut if it inspires others, then popularity isn\u0026rsquo;t so shallow\u003c/em\u003e), so does the human (\u003cem\u003eevery day I feel different\u003c/em\u003e). Curiosity becomes a distinctive figure of a literacy event that challenges any \u0026lsquo;economy of the Same\u0026rsquo; (Ball, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR4\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e, p. 138) and creates the possibility for processes of autonomous subjectivation. It is exactly the gathering together of heterogeneous entities in the literacy assemblages which makes the normal unnecessary, and makes education as an open (indeterminate) process where the possibility arises for the human-technology assemblages of being addressed and interrupted by the other, whether it is a human or a technical entity (Biesta 2015, 146).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eBecoming \u0026lsquo;digitally literate\u0026rsquo; here involves learning from the fundamental encounter with an heterogenous postdigital other, ​​it entails invitations for a practice of literacy freedom which also clears the responsibility that comes with such freedom. Finally it involves the search for emancipation as the unending fashioning of compostist mode of being with digital technology.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eIn this article we situated critical digital literacy into a postdigital perspective, showing what this implies in terms of literacy conceptualization and design. We showed how designing digital literacy education using the principles of relationality, sympoiesis and education-as-subjectivation creates the conditions of possibility for an educational experience where literacy development exceeds both reductionist attempts to foster \u0026ldquo;how to do\u0026rsquo;s\u0026rdquo; and mere aspirations of intellectual participation and/or instrumental maximization.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eEmbracing postdigital literacy as a lived experience where the role of matter and bodies is taken seriously, our proposal for the design of critical digital literacy education draws on art-based methodologies as classroom resource to spatialise students\u0026rsquo; affective (both embodied and cognitive) engagements with technologies (Massumi, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1995\u003c/span\u003e, Matthews, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). In this way, our design foregrounds an aesthetic of recruitment and composing, that is, a strategy of interweaving to recruit new materials, bodies and experiences into emergent and compost-like gatherings or arrangements of play. In this view, literacy is organized around \u0026ldquo;practices of interfacing that involve increasingly undetermined and diverse sets of bodies, sensations, devices and materials\u0026rdquo;. It also entails \u0026ldquo;practices of establishing interfaces that negotiate multiple bodies, devices and objects\u0026rdquo; (Apperley, Jayemanne and Nansen, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR3\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e, p. 204).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhy such a reconceptualization of design for digital literacy education matters when it comes to the general question about education in a postdigital world? Of course, we can continue with our established understanding(s) of digital literacy education which grants prominence to the human and its capacity to master its relations with the world. Nevertheless, in our reading this would result in remaining encapsulated within the strictures of disciplinary and modulative education to digital literacy development, even when this is framed as a critical endeavour. That is, this would mean to equate digital literacy education to the disciplining of a subject which engages with the endless struggle for the maximization of human control over a multifarious, elusive or threatening technological environment and/or for the optimization of efficiency in the mastering of technological tools. While those modes of literacy development clearly establish a nexus between digital literacy and the constitution of digital citizenship, this points to an anthropocentric and epistemically violent understanding of citizenship.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe perspective we experimented with in this article offers a different way to approach the nexus between the politics of design for digital literacy education and citizenship in a postdigital world, where literacy practices are understood as ways to nurture citizenship as a process of becoming which involves heterogeneous agencies in collective and distributed participation and thinking for the common good (Emejulu and McGregor, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). What emerges is an educational framework for a postdigital citizenship education where the key aspiration for digital literacy development becomes to nurture the capacity to participate in the ongoing bargaining that any postdigital assemblage demands or, better, to set the conditions of possibility for unruled literacy encounters where the aim is to grasp and participate in such an ongoing bargaining. The understanding of citizenship we endorse here is one of an assembled and sympoietic citizenship, based on a conception of ecological engagement and participation with a broader view of agency that includes non-human agents or the material world, including the digital. If such a conception of postdigital citizenship implicates literacy as criticality, that is a shared attitude towards an inquiry into the ethico-political constitution of the (post)digital world (Peters and Besley, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR31\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e) and literacy as critically-oriented transformative action (Rapanta, 2023), educating for literacy development becomes a relentless work of composition and re-composition, a work of sympoietic commoning through the exploration of learning human-digital assemblages which strives as \u0026lsquo;compost-like entities\u0026rsquo; to remain detached from both the desires for control and/or acquisition. Commoning here refers to the creation of new beginnings (Biesta, 2015) for compost-like entities through a direct engagement with the problems of our postdigital world \u0026lsquo;in common\u0026rsquo;. Key literacy education activities are here questioning, politicising and troubling common issues which have a relation to the human-digital composing, in spaces which favors \u0026ldquo;uncanny happenings, affective communal undertakings, uncomfortable becomings\u0026rdquo; (Collet-Sabet and Ball, 2022, 10). Critical digital literacy education, in a postdigital world, turns into a series of practices of non-predictable implication and transformation, a commoning experience for the construction of assemblages (and subjectivities within the latter) that are antagonistic to functionalist, utilitarian, acquisitive, exploitative relations to the postdigital world. In the perspective we advocate in this article, this sounds as the most promising way to interpret the nexus between digital literacy education and the making of a post-digital citizenship, assuming this endeavour as a condition for the formation of more open, just, and sustainable postdigital futures.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003cp\u003e \u003ch2\u003eConsent to Participate\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eParticipants were involved in a program promoted by the Regional School Office of Campania (Ufficio Scolastico Regionale per la Campania \u0026ndash; USR). All participants provided informed consent to take part in the activities and agreed to the use of data generated during the project for research and educational purposes.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003ch2\u003eHuman Ethics\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003e All procedures involving participants were conducted in accordance with applicable ethical standards.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003ch2\u003eEthics Approval\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003e This study was conducted within the framework an educational program promoted by the Regional School Office (Ufficio Scolastico Regionale per la Campania \u0026ndash; USR) of Campania. All procedures were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eFunding Declaration\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo external funding was received for the development of this study.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAuthor Contribution\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eBoth authors contributed equally to all aspects of this work, including research design, manuscript writing, and editing.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAuthors (2025)\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAllaste, AA., Waechter, N. Digital Citizenship and Digital Literacy: Key Themes in Current Debates and Empirical Contributions. \u003cem\u003eJAYS\u003c/em\u003e 8, 163\u0026ndash;171 (2025). \u003cspan class=\"ExternalRef\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"RefSource\"\u003ehttps://doi.org/10.1007/s43151-025-00182-1\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan address=\"10.1007/s43151-025-00182-1\" targettype=\"DOI\" class=\"RefTarget\"\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eApperley, T., Jayemanne, D. \u0026amp; B. Nansen (2018), Postdigital Literacies: Materiality, Mobility and the Aesthetics of Recruitment, In \u003cem\u003eLiteracy, Media, Technology: Past, Present and Future\u003c/em\u003e, edited by B. Parry, C. Burnett and G. Merchant. London: Bloomsbury.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBall, S. J. (2019). 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Untangling media literacy, information literacy, and digital literacy: A systematic meta-review of core concepts in media education. \u003cem\u003eJournal of Media Literacy Education\u003c/em\u003e, 14(1), 168\u0026ndash;182. \u003cspan class=\"ExternalRef\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"RefSource\"\u003ehttps://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2022-14-1-12\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan address=\"10.23860/JMLE-2022-14-1-12\" targettype=\"DOI\" class=\"RefTarget\"\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":true,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true},"keywords":"Postdigital literacy, critical literacy, relational ontology, sympoiesis, sociological fiction, art-based education","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-9291705/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9291705/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eEducators are increasingly asked to design digital literacy experiences. Yet most attempts, we argue, suffer from limitations imposed by a deterministic \u0026ndash; either social or technological \u0026ndash; perspective, where humans and machines are assumed as competing for control and literacy is equated with mastery. In this article we propose to reconceptualize digital literacy at the crossroads between a critical approach and a postdigital perspective and show what implication it has for the design of digital literacy education. At the conceptual level, we present our distinctive understanding of a critical postdigital literacy, based on a relational ontology, a sympoietic rationality and an understanding of education as more-than-human subjectivation. At the design level, using as an example the case of a series of art-based digital literacy workshops, we show how such a conceptualization enables a particular kind of design for postdigital critical literacy practices. Through an experimental exercise in sociological fiction, we discuss how students engaged in a socio-material, bodily and aesthetics practice of critical digital literacy as experimental re-assembling. In conclusion we discuss how the perspective we experimented with offers a different way to approach the nexus between the politics of design for digital literacy education and citizenship in a postdigital world. Here literacy practices are understood as ways to nurture the capacity of heterogeneous agencies to participate in the ongoing bargaining that any postdigital assemblage demands and, relatedly, to promote citizenship as a process of becoming which involves collective and distributed participation and thinking for the common good.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"Postdigital design for critical digital literacy education. Relationality, sympoiesis and experimental re-assembling","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2026-04-20 17:33:28","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-9291705/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"bdb3dd6f-80f7-466f-8dd7-80ad075dba2c","owner":[],"postedDate":"April 20th, 2026","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"posted","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-04-20T17:33:28+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2026-04-20 17:33:28","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-9291705","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-9291705","identity":"rs-9291705","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"XKTyCvWXoU3ODBz1xrDgd","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}