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Abstract
In the fall of 2020 and 2021, students enrolled in my ‘Digital Tools and Social Media in English Education’ course created remixes (audio-visual mash-ups) of the discordant ways teaching and learning are represented on YouTube, the world’s most prominent video-sharing platform. The purpose of the project was to (1) invite preservice teachers to upend rhetoric or representations they hoped to challenge in their future teaching and (2) to consider the broader cultural impact of digital platforms on teacher identity. In this dissertation, I think with various post-structural concepts in my analyses of this project as a means to consider how new and different educational outcomes might cohere within a socio-technical landscape dominated by the logics of commodification, prediction, and enclosure. The study is organized into three manuscripts.For the first manuscript, I consider how two cohorts of preservice teachers remixed disparate representations of teaching and learning on YouTube. Various flows, connections, feelings, and capacities for action are explored with an eye toward the
potential of inviting educators to (un)make sense of themselves in relation to the increasing algorithmic striation of cultural expression mediated by online platforms.
For the second manuscript, I look to reframe the concept of digital remix—often framed in literacy studies as a means to promote multimodal engagement and creative play—as a vibrant cultural force capable of crosscutting the striated, algorithmic architectures of contemporary online platforms. In the closing portions of the manuscript, I gesture toward the critical-creative power of literacy engagements that seek to intervene in the logics of platform technologies by exploring two remix productions (resulting from the course project I assigned) and offering algorithm remix as a pedagogical platform intervention.
For the third manuscript, I provide a thirty-year retrospective on the historical entanglement of what has come to be known as “participatory culture” and Deleuze’s descriptions of societies of control. After exploring the respective histories and contemporary logics of participatory culture and control, I attempt to think forward by offering two new terms to think with: anticipated participation and elusory participation. Implications for literacy educators in the platform era are also discussed.