Dr Murat Oztok

Biography

My research explores how digital technologies shape educational knowledge, participation, and experience. I work at the intersection of postdigital education, postcolonial theory, networked learning, and critical digital pedagogy, with a particular interest in questions of epistemic justice, authority, voice, and educational futures. Across this work, I examine how digital systems can reproduce or challenge existing structures of power and inequality, and how educational practices might be reimagined in more inclusive and equitable ways.

A central concern across my research is understanding whose knowledge becomes visible and legitimate within digital spaces, and how educational relations are formed, sustained, and experienced in practice. Rather than approaching technology as a neutral tool or inevitable force of change, I am interested in how technological systems are embedded within broader social, cultural, and political conditions. My work therefore examines how educational technologies shape or limit what can be known, whose voices become heard, and how particular futures become imagined and normalised while others remain marginal or excluded.

My recent work has focused on themes including postcolonial analyses of networked learning, solidarity and collective pedagogy, educational imagination and futurity, and the ethics of participation and knowledge production. More recently, I have been exploring solidarity as both an ethical and practical condition of collective learning, examining how participation in digital and networked contexts is sustained through relations of care, maintenance, responsibility, and ongoing collective support rather than connection alone.

I am also interested in methodological questions and in how research itself shapes what becomes visible, sayable, or knowable. This includes work on alternative and creative methodological approaches, ethnography, and questions concerning the co-production of knowledge and researcher responsibility.

Research Overview

My current projects include research on postdigital solidarity, educational imagination, and critical futures studies.

Current Research

1. Educational Imagination, Technology, and Futures

I explore how educational technologies shape the ways educational problems and futures are imagined. This work examines how technological solutions can both expand and constrain educational possibilities, with particular attention to questions of anticipation, repair, and educational imagination.

2. Postcoloniality, Solidarity, and Networked Learning

This work investigates how participation and collective learning are experienced within digital and networked environments. Drawing on postcolonial perspectives, I examine how learning communities are sustained through relations of care, maintenance, responsibility, and solidarity, rather than through connection alone.

3. Knowledge Production, Voice, and Research Ethics

I examine questions of authority, voice, and representation in research, with particular attention to how knowledge is produced and whose perspectives become visible or marginalised. This work explores issues of epistemic justice, Indigenous perspectives, and researcher responsibility.

4. Methodological Innovation and Networked Learning Research

I am interested in methodological questions and in developing approaches that can engage with complexity, scale, and emerging forms of educational practice. This includes work on creative and alternative methodologies, ethnography, and methodological development within Networked Learning.