Hybrid Bodies: Future Digital Cultures and Pedagogies - Ned Barker

“Many of us already live intimately with technology. Waking together everyday. Wrapped around us. Tracking our every move and mood.” These words float over the first scene of a short sociological experimental film I directed, Our Hybrid Bodies. They accompany a close-up shot of a common sports watch on a wrist with its flashing biosensors superimposed; the watch starts to buzz as the body slowly wakes. The smart device returns throughout the narrative shaping the wearers (inter)actions. It enters their daily life influencing how they learn about themselves (e.g., how they sleep, relax/breath, work, and physically train), others, and the environment.

Technologies purposely designed to assist embodied learning experiences are far from new and yet the landscape is shifting because of recent advancements in biosensing and AI. In this talk I briefly survey the expanding terrain in EdTech and beyond where new relations between bodies and technologies are emerging. I will argue that many future technologies are laced with potential to disrupt both established cultures and pedagogies in unknowable ways. To illustrate this argument, I elaborate on a new class of technology, Interactive Skin.

Ned Barker is Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Knowledge Lab, where he leads the research theme Technology, the Body and Cognition. Prior to this he was a Lecturer in Education at the University of Lincoln where he ran a Masters course in Education and Social Justice. He has a background in sensory ethnography attuning his practice to performance art, sporting cultures, modes of industrial production, technological mediation of touch, and experimental collaborations with artists. His current research project Biohybrid Bodies is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Recent publications include Interactive Skin through a social-sensory speculative lens (with Jewitt and Steimle), Future Touch in Industry (with Jewitt), and An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness.