大象传媒

Professor Emeritus, University of South Africa (Unisa)

This meditation on our* times/this moment in time - a time of monsters - proceeds from recognising the intergenerational debt produced by modernity鈥檚 brutal obsession with control - over nature, tecnology and 鈥渙thers鈥�, its insatiable thirst for technological advancement at all costs and its fascination with the artificial (Antoinette Rouvroy), its narratives of carceral progress and expansionism, its continued plundering of the commons (Guy Standing), its cannibalisation and commodification of life (Nancy Fraser) and its blatant refusal to recognise its debt and to be held accountable (Bayo Akomolafe/ Achilles Mbembe).

How can we dance when our earth is turnin鈥�?

How do we sleep while our beds are burnin鈥�?

The time has come to say fair鈥檚 fair

To pay the rent, to pay our share

The time has come, a fact鈥檚 a fact

It belongs to them, let鈥檚 give it back

Midnight Oil, 1987

Settling modernity鈥檚 bill is left to those seen as the collateral damage of modernity (Zygmunt Bauman), those living in the Majority world, the Small Island States, the migrants, and those living in liminal and precarious spaces at the intersections of gender, race, caste, culture, and location. I invite you to consider not only the legacy of modernity, but to consider alternative ways of being and knowing including that 鈥榠ntelligence鈥� is not a unique human characteristic but is shared with life on Earth (Karen Barad; James Bridle); and that being and becoming human is entangled with the planetary and the tools humans created and create (Akomolafe/Mbembe).

I hope to bring this meditation to a close with proposing that we engage with the monstrous as an invitation to consider what makes us human (Bayo Akomolafe), and to explore making/living cracks in seemingly impenetrable, inevitable and recursive cycles sustaining the Capitaloscene. There is no right answer, just millions of experiments of refusal and a communal weaving of a We (John Holloway).

Paul Prinsloo has just retired from being a Research Professor in Open and Distance eLearning (ODeL) in the Department of Business Management, College of Economic and Management Sciences, University of South Africa (Unisa).

He is a visiting professor at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), a Research Associate for Contact North/Contact Nord (Canada) and the University of Bergen (Norway), a member of the Center for Open Education Research at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Germany), an elected member of the Fellows' Council and Senior Fellow of the European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN), and serves on several editorial boards.

Paul has published numerous articles in the fields of teaching and learning, student success in distributed learning contexts, the ethical collection, analysis, and use of student data in learning analytics, and digital identities.