Over the last 20 years, education and open learning are facing increasingly complex challenges, related to ongoing processes of digitalization, datafication and globalization. In the corresponding discourses and practices, keywords like “digital education”, “future skills”, “education for sustainable development” (ESD) as well as various literacies such as critical media literacy, data literacy, sustainability literacy, and futures literacy play a prominent role. However, structures of digital capitalism and strategies of the Global Education Industry (GEI) are often taken as invariable points of departure in the context of educational innovation. At the same time, instrumental logics of digital innovation and transformation as well as paradoxes of unsustainable dimensions of developments referred to as “sustainable developments” are frequently not critically taken into account in both, educational research and politics. In contrast, the symposium starts from the assumption, that there are many alternative pathways of innovation if any. It aims at analyzing forms of dealing with contingency in cultures of digitality by focusing on issues of datafication and sustainability in education. Furthermore, it is questioning the literacification of everything using the example of futures literacy.

The symposium brings together empirical results, theoretical considerations and reflections on media (educational) practices dealing with questions such as:

- How are today’s globalized assemblages of digital capitalism dependent upon ecologically unequal exchanges between nations situated in the global core and periphery?

- Which goals, methods and forms of critical media education are important to strengthen democratic and sustainable development paths in media development, in the use and design of digital media? 

- How can these goals, methods and forms address oversimplified or problematic interpretations of datafication and digital capitalism? (e.g. anti-semitic, racist, personalizing etc. forms of critique of capitalism)

- Meta-processes such as digitalization, datafication, globalization and capitalization easily result in an atmosphere of powerlessness. How can educational research and practice enable empowering experiences to citizens?

- What is the role of media educational research for designing viable futures of education?

The symposium addresses selected aspects along the outlined questions from theoretical and empirical perspectives with contributions from Austria, Germany, New Zealand and Scotland.

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