Reimagining digital citizenship through postdigital ecosystems: a polylogue across contexts

This study examined the complexities of digital citizenship through a postdigital ecosystem lens, drawing on a polylogue methodology that brought together diverse perspectives across global, cultural, and institutional contexts. Using a collaboratively developed dataset of written respondent contributions, the study explored how postdigital citizenship education can be reimagined through three analytic lenses: tensions, opportunities, and ways forward. The analysis highlighted the relational and situated nature of digital citizenship and underscored how power, access, identity, agency, and technological infrastructures co-construct civic participation across learning environments. Tensions emerged through policy-practice disconnects, narrow curricula, persistent inequities in access and participation, and the contradictory role of digital technologies in educational ecosystems. Opportunities appeared in hybrid and entangled learning spaces, students’ everyday digital practices, and more relational and dialogic approaches to civic learning. The paper outlines ways forward through curricular transformation, lifelong and relational learning, equity-centered design and access, ecological and relational approaches to teaching and learning, and policy development that reflects sociotechnical complexity. Rather than starting from a singular model of digital citizenship, the study offers insights from a multi-voiced inquiry for expanding conceptual understandings of citizenship education, which is in turn reoriented as a dynamic, negotiated practice within postdigital entanglements. Implications for educational policy, research, and practice are offered.