The book provides a dynamic, cross-sectional, multidisciplinary perspective and dialogue to illuminate the challenges humans face in their interactions with data in their individual postdigital contexts in local communities. It offers unique insights from real cases, collaborations, and projects to extend existing academic theories and frameworks, applied to human data interactions, disadvantage, and digital skills. The book takes the novel approach of establishing co-authorship between cross-sector practitioners from the wider community (such as local authorities, councils, policy makers, small businesses, charities, education and skills providers, and other stakeholders) with international academics and researchers who write about humans, digital skills, and data. This develops an enabling cross-sector environment throughout the book that not only furthers broader understandings concerning data, disadvantage and digital skills in postdigital society, but also shares a template to support others who may wish to adopt this approach to co-authorship and knowledge exchange.
The book revisits the Human Data Interaction (HDI) framework (Mortier, Haddadi, Henderson, McAuley, and Crowcroft 2014) through many diverse cross-sectoral perspectives. These are co-authored under the HDI framework’s key tenets of: agency, legibility, negotiability and resistance. These tenets form the main sections of the book, with chapters examining these concepts through both interdisciplinary academic literature and cross-sector dialogue with individuals and agencies from the wider community who work with diverse and often disadvantaged groups.
Sarah Hayes is Professor of Higher Education Policy and a Principal Fellow of the HEA. She is an Honorary Professor at Aston University, Birmingham, UK, and an Associate Editor for the Postdigital Science and Education journal. Sarah co-edited Bioinformational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies (2022) with Michael Peters and Petar Jandrić. She also wrote The Labour of Words in Higher Education (2019) and Postdigital Positionality (2021) which opened debate on how disadvantage manifests in the disconnect between inclusivity policies and the widespread digitalisation and datafication of society.
Michael Jopling is Professor of Education at the University of Brighton, UK. His research examines education policy and its effects on schools and universities, particularly in relation to issues like leadership, disadvantage, and inclusion. He is link convenor of EERA’s Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education network and Associate Editor of Management in Education. His most recent publications have explored the impact of education policy and the pandemic on schools and vulnerable young people and the extent to which the pandemic represents a missed opportunity to rethink education.
Stuart Connor is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Derby, UK. With thirty years’ experience in Policy Analysis and Futures Studies, recent publications have explored relationships between developments in the fields of mobilities, futures, and postdigital studies and different forms of data and power in postdigital society. His current research interest is the 'power of data'. This includes the study of data use practices, how data are enacted, and what this reflects and realises regarding agents' perspectives on the reproduction, disruption, and transformation of data regimes and systems.
Matthew Johnson is Head of Research at the Black Equity Organisation, where he leads on all research pillars including education and skills. He is completing his doctoral research, which specialises in International Education, at the University of Sussex. Matt has an interest in the inequities of data in the postdigital world and the pathways to address them. He is particularly interested in a comparative approach, drawing lessons from economies and systems from beyond the UK to inform domestic policy and practice.
