Digital Skills as Skills of Resistance: from digital skills training to anti-digital skills training

FINAL TEXT:

The Transforming the Gap: Inclusive Digital Arts and Humanities Research Skills (DAReS) project was funded to develop an inclusive digital and data skills curriculum using reflective, trust-based co-design over one year. This paper focuses on a series of inclusion workshops and reflective sessions at the beginning and end of the project. Funding was based on the premise of a rising demand for academics across disciplines to have a wide range of digital skills and literacies (Gilster, 1997; Tygel & Kirsch, 2016; Miltner, 2025; Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2020). However, these literacies shape what is acceptable as both methods, data and epistemologies.

In the initial workshops, participants articulated a techno-utopianism and a concern about the increasing datafication of research for credibility (Small, 2009). In the reflection sessions, a tension emerged as the participants articulated learning points in terms of a language of resistance, illustrating that engaging in data-oriented research could further marginalise underrepresented groups (Benjamin, 2020; Chun, 2021; D'Ignazio and Klein, 2023; Costanza-Chock, 2020). The datafication of Arts and Humanities research acts as a discursive closure, defining what is valued and important (Louw, 2001). Rather than opening new opportunities, teaching digital skills conveyed the message of limiting what types of data could be pursued.

An alternative could be learning digital skills through the lens of the arts, which develops a position of resistance. Learning digital skills gave our participants language to articulate and object to datafication, reflecting how pedagogy has been used as a tool of resistance in the past; how gig workers have used digital tools to create spaces of resistance; efforts resisting automation of work; and finally using the master tools to understand how his house is constructed (Benanav, 2022; Bonini & Treré, 2024; Freire,1985; Lorde, 2023). Digital skills training can empower learners to resist digitisation from a position of criticality.