[special issue] Customised Diversity?

Education, Capitalism and Diversity in the Digital Condition

Together with Valentin Dander, Rachel Shanks, Nina Grünberger and Theo Hug, I co-edited a special issue for seminar.net. Media, Technology & Lifelong Learning, motivated by our shared concern that the notion of diversity is widely accepted as a positive value in Europe and beyond, but, in the context of current capitalist relations in general, has long since developed into a marketable slogan.

In the form of »diversity management«, diversity has been customised as a technology of corporate management (Krell 2015). In the political arena, such a logic of diversity, compatible with capital structures and utilising capitalist relations, corresponds to a dominant liberal anti-racism that – cynically speaking – resigns itself to the equal exploitation of all (Roldán Mendívil & Sarbo 2022: 34).

Under the formula Customised Diversity?, this special issue addresses a core ambivalence of capitalist markets: On the one hand, they promise a diversity of product range and thus a customised, identity-awarding consumption experience. This is contrasted with capitalism’s tendency toward monopolisation and thus a collapse of diversityamong market participants on the other hand.

In this regard, the Educational Context is particularly interesting as Big Tech and for-profit educational industries are pushing into the ed tech (educational technology) sector, seeking to install mono-cultures of digital Infrastructures of Teaching and Learning (Dander, Hug, Sander & Shanks 2021). They promise their products – learning applications, platforms, environments etc. – to be adaptive to individual learners, or even to be ›learning‹ themselves. Systems like these are claimed as ›instruments‹ or ›tools‹ that can contribute to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in learning. At the same time, these values have become more controversial than before, if we look at how the current political landscape is affecting US education and research institutions.

With contributions by Anselm Böhmer, Valentin Dander, Nina Grünberger, Barbara Gross, Theo Hug, Christian Leineweber, Petra Missomelius, Anthony G. Picciano, Lilli Riettiens, Jan-René Schluchter and Ulrike Stadler-Altmann