Conference Program

This article intervenes in current debates on critical digital literacy, joining concerns about the lack of a solid conceptualization to sustain both scholarly inquiry and educational intervention (Garavaglia & Petti 2025, Pangrazio 2016). While media education and digital literacy seem to be key topics of current educational policy agendas, existing frameworks in both fields remain rooted in a print-centered understanding of literacy. This view relies on a narrow and anthropocentric logic that suppresses the diversity of resources for meaning-making (Campbell & Olteanu 2024). Within this paradigm, students are reduced either to masters of technological tools or victims of media manipulation (Buckingham 2020), and literacy is flattened into a set of quantifiable and standardized competencies.

Building on this, in this article we repurpose the idea of critical digital literacy through the lens of postdigital approaches (Jandric 2019): this combination is aimed to enable a more nuanced, non-dichotomic and non-reductionist understanding of critical digital literacy (or literacies), attentive to the multiple materialities, forces and agencies entangled in sociodigital encounters. To further this discussion, this article engages with our experience in designing, implementing, and reflecting on a series of media education workshops taking place from March to April 2025 and involving six schools. Each workshop, organized as part of a programme for the promotion of pedagogical innovation, brought together a group of students from the third year of a low-secondary school and one from the first year of high-secondary school. The workshops unfolded in two phases: a critical analysis of a social media platform, carried out through guided navigation; a creative, artistic phase of reimagination, in which students were invited to materially reimagine the platform using the collage technique.

Methodologically, therefore, our work unpacks into two interrelated stages: the art-based classroom activity, and an experiment in sociological fictional writing, through which we reassembled the data collected in two fictional vignettes (Hrastinski 2025). Our choice to rely on these methods is consistent with our theoretical stance: in a sector increasingly subject to intensive datafication, and where data that count are those that can be easily counted, art-based research introduces generative frictions in data production processes, while fictional writing surfaces latent or overlooked dimensions, enabling the creation of our own ‘data lives’ (Kitchin 2021).

After presenting the fictions, we will discuss the workshops as entry points to rethink critical digital literacy from a postdigital perspective, framing them as occasions to enact third spaces of education, which we understand as sites open to multiple forms of negotiation, discovery and play, particularly suited to enable generative forms of engagement with new media and related literacies (McDougall et al. 2018). Drawing on the workshops, we reconceptualize literacy as inevitably intertwined with agency (Code 2025, Jiang et al. 2024), and describe this twofold articulation as: i) a programmatic process of defamiliarization of digital practices, spaces and actants, often internalized and taken for granted; and ii) a strategic act of reimagination and creative speculation, aimed at reclaiming spaces of assertion, refusal and negotiation within technological interfaces, functions, and algorithmic processes.