Part I. Foundations and Tensions of Postdigital Learner Agency

Abstract

This chapter analyzes, critiques, and rethinks Postdigital Learner Agency (PLA) and calls for a humble approach to agency and an engagement with absurdity. Although PLA expands the conceptualization of agency to include relational, spatial, collective, and shared dimensions, it is an inherently humanistic construct that treats agency as a human ability and places unjustifiable responsibility on the ‘learner.’ PLA’s excess of positivity (Han 2015) puts learners in the impossible position of becoming agents of transformation (Code 2025: 346) within dauntingly powerful techno-capitalist algorithmic systems intentionally designed to eliminate the need (or desire) for human agency. Rather than persisting in the face of inevitable failure or becoming withdrawn and desperate, I propose addressing the paradox of PLA by rethinking agency as a tentative attentiveness to flows of action (Introna 2019) and rethinking responsibility as a responsiveness to our entanglements (Barad 2006). This involves the playful misuse of the characteristic behaviours of algorithmification as a way of profaning what has become sacred in the postdigital age (Agamben 2007). Instead of viewing agency as a human capacity to fight against oppressive algorithmic systems, we must understand it as a means of maintaining freedom for divergent thought while existing within the algorithmic order.