Adult Learning in the Control Society: Digital Era Governance, Literacies of Control, and the Work of Adult Educators

Abstract

This article reports on a study of adult literacy and learning in a public computing center where people contend with the new literacy demands of online government and other automated technologies. The study asks, (1) What literacy and learning practices are associated with digital governance? (2) What pedagogies support people to navigate digital government and automated technologies? (3) What are the broader implications of digital government for the work of adult educators? Bringing together sociomaterial theories of learning and methodologies of ethnographic case study, the study maps the literacies and pedagogies of digital government in the context of Deleuze’s society of control, arguing that digital-era governance spurs new forms of cognitive labor, new digital literacies and new pedagogies that are reshaping adult learning and the work of adult literacy educators. The article considers potential openings to “more than human” research and pedagogies that reconfigure adult literacy research and practice as sites of resistance to the control society.