Critical social science didactics in the face of the digital transformation paradox

Abstract

The article critically confronts what the author calls the ‘paradox of digitisation’ in the teaching of social sciences. This consists of the complex dichotomy between the need for students to be educated in digital competence and the fact that digitalisation has, at the same time, a biopolitical character of control and disciplining. In the face of this, Fedicaria's approach allows for a professional exercise in resistance to the most negative aspects of this paradox. Aspects such as educating desire (teaching to imagine other worlds, including virtual space) and challenging pedagogical and professional codes (especially those that have to do with the negative dimension of digitalisation) become some of the most useful postulates proposed by the critical didactics of the social sciences for education in the 21st century. The latter, for its part, transforms and adapts its practices, but not its sense of opposition to the barbarism of late capitalism societies.