Full metadata
Title
Digital learning in the wild: re-imagining new ruralism, digital equity, and deficit discourses through the thirdspace
Description
Digital media is becoming increasingly important to learning in today’s changing times. At the same time, digital technologies and related digital skills are unevenly distributed. Further, deficit-based notions of this digital divide define the public’s educational paradigm. Against this backdrop, I forayed into the social reality of one rural Americana to examine digital learning in the wild. The larger purpose of this dissertation was to spatialize understandings of rural life and pervasive social ills therein, in order to rethink digital equity, such that we dismantle deficit thinking, problematize new ruralism, and re-imagine more just rural geographies. Under a Thirdspace understanding of space as dynamic, relational, and agentive (Soja, 1996), I examined how digital learning is caught up spatially to position the rural struggle over geography amid the ‘Right to the City’ rhetoric (Lefebvre, 1968). In response to this limiting and urban-centric rhetoric, I contest digital inequity as a spatial issue of justice in rural areas. After exploring how digital learning opportunities are distributed at state and local levels, I geo-ethnographically explored digital use to story how families across socio-economic spaces were utilizing digital tools. Last, because ineffective and deficit-based models of understanding erupt from blaming the oppressed for their own self-made oppression, or framing problems (e.g., digital inequity) as solely human-centered, I drew in posthumanist Latourian (2005) social cartographies of Thirdspace. From this, I re-imagined educational equity within rural space to recast digital equity not in terms of the “haves and have nots” but as an account of mutually transformative socio-technical agency. Last, I pay the price of criticism by suggesting possible actions and solutions to the social ills denounced throughout this dissertation.
Date Created
2017
Contributors
- Cirell, Anna Montana (Author)
- Gee, Elisabeth R. (Thesis advisor)
- Gee, James (Committee member)
- Beardsley, Audrey (Committee member)
- Carlson, David L. (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
vii, 332 pages : illustrations (chiefly color), color maps
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.45496
Statement of Responsibility
by Anna Montana Cirell
Description Source
Viewed on February 28, 2018
Level of coding
full
Note
thesis
Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2017
bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 280-301)
Field of study: Learning, literacies and technologies
System Created
- 2017-10-02 07:18:23
System Modified
- 2021-08-26 09:47:01
- 3 years 2 months ago
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