Su-Ming Khoo and Caroline Kuhn discuss how their collaboration led to the development of a theoretical kaleidoscope as a methodological toolkit to examine digital inequalities by drawing on multiple perspectives, including the Capability Approach, to capture the complexities of poverty and multidimensional disparities.
Su-Ming Khoo (National University of Ireland) and Caroline Kuhn (Bath Spa University)
This blog offers a brief critical reflection on a collaborative article, 'Understanding Digital Inequality: A Theoretical Kaleidoscope', by 9 authors based in England (Caroline, Tom, Sandra Sinfield), Ireland (Su-Ming), South Africa (Laura, Warren), India (Swati), Scotland (Aisling), Canada (Sandra Abbeglen), and 3 reviewers from the journal Postdigital Science & Education who each publish a brief Comment, included with the article: Petar Jandrić, Jeremy Knox, and Alison Mackenzie.
The article explores different theoretical approaches for investigating digital inequalities, including: the capabilities approach (CA), Bourdieu’s theory of practice, cultural-historical activity theory, affective injustice, resources appropriation theory, critical pedagogy, Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice, and realist social theory. Each lens is discussed separately, to explore its advantages, with examples which shed light on aspects of digital inequality. Critical realism is included as a metatheory, a philosophy for social science that goes beyond what is commonsensical and observable at first sight, to uncover hidden social structures and mechanisms embedded in sociotechnical systems. Critical realism is an emancipatory philosophy that aligns with the goals of flourishing for all, a key preoccupation of our collective. A critical perspective is crucial, since social structures, power relations, and ‘commonsensical’ ideas tend to remain invisible, making it more difficult to challenge the values, vested interests, and power relations embedded in the design and development of digital systems.
The CA is a valuable facet of our theoretical kaleidoscope because it is focused on inequalities, having been used over the past decades to understand poverty and multidimensional deprivation. However, the CA has not been much used to evaluate technologies. One example might be Kleine’s (2013) analysis of the Chilean government’s digital agenda, using CA to underpin a ‘choice framework’ for understanding information and communications technology (ICT) uptake in rural communities. Another example we discuss uses Fraser’s tripartite model together with Nussbaum’s ‘central capabilities’ to evaluate energy distribution and ‘smart grids’. The ubiquity of digital communications means that much participatory research contains a digital dimension, thus our ‘kaleidoscope’ may be helpful for studying community-based participatory projects, like those studied through the lenses of epistemic injustice in Walker and Boni’s edited volume (2020), or their follow-up volume (Walker, Boni & Velasco, 2024), which takes CA, participatory and collaborative research towards questions of transformative and reparative justice. Our article originated in the desire to craft a collective response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, as our appreciation of the inequality implications of the worldwide digital pivot in teaching and learning grew. The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, most adversely impacting the most disadvantaged and vulnerable learners. Emerging realities made digital inequalities impossible to overlook in our own lives and professional practices, as educators and educational specialists, so we decided to come together, and collaborate using Zoom, to find ways to understand and address some of these pressing inequalities.
Our collaboration led us to the idea of a theoretical kaleidoscope as a methodological toolkit that can help a collective to examine and critique constitutive elements and dimensions of digital inequalities. We used the idea of a kaleidoscope as a metaphor to describe how different theoretical approaches can be seen together, side-by-side, yet avoiding having one perspective subsume another. Metaphors structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do (Lakoff and Johnson 1981). A kaleidoscope evokes ideas of play, which we understood as serious play: an experiential process to prompt dialogue and encourage reflection, develop problem-solving skills and the use of the imagination, while at the same time building community. As collaborators, we took a critical attitude towards what we later articulated as ‘the ideology of digitalism’, which we saw as complicit with inequalities which negatively impact human flourishing.
The article also responded to the scope of the journal – concerning the ‘postdigital’ in science and education. For us, ‘the postdigital’ does not mean that the digital is over, rather that it has mutated into new power structures that are less evident but no less insidious, as they continue to govern socio-technical infrastructures, geopolitics, and markets. Both the theoretical kaleidoscope’s diversity of theories and its collaborative approach serve the search for approaches that enable us to see the invisible, yet pervasive power structures that impact on the daily lives and settings that students and educators inhabit.
We encourage social scientists and educators to explore the kaleidoscope as toolkit, either in a research or research methods teaching context. A fruitful activity could be to craft an actual kaleidoscope (inexpensive kits can be bought online) with students, while discussing what possible theories could be used to investigate an issue of their interest, which could be related back to (‘post’)-digital inequalities.
‘Kaleidoscope’ is constructed from three Greek words, kalos -beautiful, eidos -form, and skopein -to view, putting them together brings us to what a kaleidoscope helps us to do, to view beautifully. Although inequalities are certainly not beautiful, what makes viewing them through a kaleidoscope beautiful is the possibility for social researchers to work alongside each other, with different perspectives. This includes possibilities of questioning and critiquing together, of asking hard and thorny questions in the pursuit of social change, recognition for differences and needs for reparation or even transformation. We remain mindful of needs for marginalised and excluded perspectives to be better represented, so that the benefits of sociotechnical systems can become more equitable. In short, what makes the kaleidoscope beautiful is the possibility for diverse perspectives to work with our diversity, challenge inequalities, and work towards human flourishing together.
In memoriam, Tom Burns (1959-2024).
References:
Lakoff and Johnson (1981). Metaphors we live by. University Chicago Press
Kleine, D. (2013). Technologies of Choice? ICTs, Development and the Capabilities Approach. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Walker, M; Boni, A; & Velasco, D., Eds. (2024) Reparative Futures and Transformative Learning Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan.
Walker, M., & Boni, A. Eds. (2020) Participatory Research, Capabilities and Epistemic Justice,Palgrave Macmillan.
Authors:
Su-Ming Khoo is Associate Professor and Head of Sociology at the University of Galway, Ireland, and Visiting Professor in Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa (2022-2027). She researches, teaches and writes about human development, human rights, public goods, development alternatives, decoloniality, global activism and learning, higher education, and transdisciplinarity. She is joint coordinator of HDCA TG Human Security, alongside Des Gasper and Michael Drinkwater
Caroline Kuhn holds a PhD in Education and is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Technology-Enhanced Learning at the School of Education at Bath Spa University. She has a particular interest in open education and social justice, including data justice, framed within a critical pedagogy approach. Her research focuses on the intersection of sociology, philosophy, technology, and education, exploring how technology-driven solutions can be meaningfully integrated into development contexts while respecting diverse ways of knowing and being. She coordinates the Thematic Group on Innovation, Technology, and Design at the Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA).