Diffraction as an analysis method of mapping interference focusing on ‘where the effects of difference appear’ was introduced to us by Haraway (1992) and again by Barad (2007, 2014) as a way of analysis to rethink difference productively. However, while diffractive analysis can generally be seen as reading different materials through one another, it is argued that there are different approaches to working with diffractive analysis (Gunnarsson & Bodén, 2021). This poster presentation aims to show how diffractive reading can be performed and what can result from it by connecting it to oceanic thinking and tidalectic methodology (Braithwaite, 1994; Hessler, 2020).The work presented here draws from a larger PhD project which empirically investigates how a successful innovative assessment practice in the digital environment at the postgraduate level is co-produced through algorithmic automationhuman-digital curation in a Lifestream. The method of this research inquiry involves thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) – poststructuralism, posthumanism, and complexity theory - and empirical materials (digital artefacts, observations, and interviews) in a diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007) so that new understandings of the research problem and research questions can be made possible (Ceder, 2015).This poster contributes by offering an enactment of diffraction. Furthermore, it makes visible my process of diffractive analysis of a more-than-human assessment practice and shares a ‘tidalectic curation’ (Hessler, 2020) of the analysis.

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching. 

The likes of John Dewey in the early 1900s and Edward Glaser in the 1940s highlighted the problem of a literate but uncritical populace, and the failure of education in relation to this (Abrami et al., 2015). As such, the very notion of uncritical thought was deemed as something of a democratic liability. Today a phenomenon has emerged that creates new challenges in this same vein: Uncritical and biased uses of research in layman debates about any and all controversial issues in society. In a mapping of the so-called climate skeptical blogosphere, Sharman (2014) showed that a few particularly influential websites acted as translators of primary research, and by reinterpreting it highly selectively have had a substantial impact on the public’s misconceptions on a global scale. Undoubtedly, academic critical thinking and research literacy – here defined as ability to assess research and uses of research critically – has a vital role to play here. In an accelerating information society (Rosa, 2013), the need for such academic critical thinking is arguably more urgent than ever – as is more knowledge about the “if, how or why not” students in higher education really reach these ideals.

In this article, we are to present empirical results from an ongoing research project on academic critical thinking and the undergraduate thesis in the humanities and social sciences, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2017–2020. The larg- er project builds on qualitative interviews with students as well as statistical modelling, but this particular part of the projectconsists of a close reading of 60 Bachelor theses. These student theses were identified as being of the highest quality in a larger sample of randomly selected theses (n = 809). The aim is to identify and analyze possible textual expressions of academic critical thinking in general and in relation to students’ reading of previous research in particular. The methodological rationale behind this approach is to use an authentic material that at face value could be expected to exhibit these qualities most clearly. This, in turn, makes it possible to scrutinize both the potential and possible limitations of these long-standing text traditions.

Theoretically, our work can be placed in the field of criticality, or critical thinking in action, in a specific context (Davies, 2015). We specifically focus on students’ suspended judgement re- garding what to believe and do. In doing so, we wish to add to the general critical thinking literature by challenging some of the most prevalent definitions therein, where the concept has come to be so all-encompassing that it risks being analytically meaningless. The use of a mid-range sample size of authentic student work will also contribute significantly to the critical thinking literature, which tends to rely on either small case studies or psychometric inventories and similar. Furthermore, our discussion about the possibilities and limitations of the textual traditions in student thesis work will be related to the emerging field of multimodal assessment (e.g. Jewitt, 2014; O’Halloran, et al, 2017 ) and the teaching-research nexus lit- erature (e.g. Jenkins, 2003; Kinkead, 2003).