About this Research Topic

Background

Today we are constantly reminded of the polarization of contemporary society, an issue that is bound up with the challenges of consuming, interpreting, and participating in the daily digital media landscape – both from the perspective of learning, broadly conceived, and from that of social sustainability. In research on sustainability, however, we tend to see a bias towards environmental and, to a lesser extent, economic issues, with social sustainability rarely receiving significant attention. It is against this backdrop that this Research Topic, jointly hosted in Frontiers in Communication and Frontiers in Education, will explore the interplay between learning, digitalization, and social sustainability from a range of different communicative and learning perspectives.

Digitalization and sustainability are broad topics, and their importance is highlighted in educational curricula all over the world, but a holistic research approach to them is rare. Sometimes the focus is placed on learning and digitalization, sometimes on learning and sustainability, and occasionally on digitalization and sustainability, but learning, digitalization and sustainability have rarely been studied in an integrated way on a larger scale. In this Research Topic, we aim to address this gap in the literature from both education and communication-specific perspectives.

Both the United Nations (2021) and the European Union (2020) have launched digitalization initiatives, which have been framed against the backdrop of a need to reimagine, revitalize, and reset education to increase inclusiveness and accessibility. In addition, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by UN member states in 2015, ”recognize[s] that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change” (United Nations, 2015). There are few areas where these issues are brought together as strongly as in the educational sphere. The call for papers for this Research Topic welcomes contributions exploring the conjunction of learning, digitalization, and social sustainability, both in the context of today’s increasingly polarized digital communication spaces, and with respect to how they may be more thoroughly integrated in future.

The editors welcome abstracts of up to 500 words, including the most relevant references.

Keywords: learning, education, digitalisation, digitalization, sustainability, social sustainability

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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