Technology, Culture, and Socioeconomics : A Rhizoanalysis of Educational Discourses

With this book, Patricia A. O'Riley engages an interdisciplinary audience with an important and highly original analysis of the cultural significance of the ubiquitously utopian, Eurocentric, technocratic discourses that abound in the current race to 'get connected and share in the dream'. O'Riley's polyvocal text weaves together aboriginal, postcolonial, and postmodern languages, locations, and worldviews that, in its performativity, is as powerfully dramaturgical as it is expository. Technology, Culture, and Socioeconomics should be required reading for every educator in need of a new lens for thinking critically about digital technologies, for researchers struggling to find a way through the paralyzing maze of postmodern deconstruction, and for all of us marginals who, against all odds, toil away in the e-sweatshops of education in the twenty-first century thinking and feeling that we might actually figure out how to hack a virus capable of derailing the neoliberal newspeak that threatens to silence and extinguish all signs of intelligent life in the universe. O'Riley's brilliant text gives us some really good code to get that virus into circulation. (Mary Bryson, Professor of Education, University of British Columbia, Canada) If, as Umberto Eco writes, a novel is a machine for generating interpretations, then 'Technology, Culture, and Socioeconomics' is a plant (ambiguous homonym intentional!) that regenerates interpretations of technology education. But Patricia A. O'Riley also reimagines and reinvents the plant/machine itself. Like a post-structuralist textual equivalent of Charles Babbage's 'difference engine', O'Riley's rhizoanalytic method runs in perpetual e-motion, continually deconstructing, decolonizing, reforming, and transforming the technocultural discourses-practices that she tracks and traces. With frequent interruptions from Coyote (and an unruly cast of fellow tricksters and travelers), O'Riley's new tales of technology education are intellectually rigorous and serious without being solemn; some are perplexing and unsettling; some will make you laugh out loud; all are utterly compelling. (Noel Gough, Professor of Education, Deakin University, Australia)