Postdigital Literacies beyond Digital Competence: A Relational Framework for Agency, Power, and Participation in Higher Education

Abstract

Proceeding from the social-theoretical premise that digital and non-digital, material and symbolic, as well as human and technological world relations are not separate spheres but rather mutually constitutive elements of postdigital orders of reality, this article reconstructs postdigital literacies not as an additively extensible inventory of individualized competencies, but as a relationally situated capacity for reflexive interpretation, normative evaluation, and co-creative transformation of sociotechnically prefigured world relations. Methodologically, the study is grounded in a critical-integrative evidence synthesis drawing on 75 publications issued between January 2020 and August 2026 in the fields of media education, educational and literacy research, sociomaterial research, and research on data literacy, algorithmic literacy, and AI literacy. These findings are not cumulatively aggregated but relationally mediated with regard to their object constitutions, normative frameworks, and empirical scope. Within this analytical framework, it becomes evident that postdigital literacies cannot be adequately understood either as individualized, action-enabling knowledge or as a mere extension of digital competence. A relational heuristic is proposed instead, in which operational connectivity, infrastructural transparency, the capacity for reflexive distancing, distributed agency, and transformative participation mutually condition one another without forgoing their respective claims to validity. Within this architecture, competence refers to the situation-specific disposition to act; education, understood here in its transformative rather than merely instructional sense, refers to the reflexive transformation of relations to the self, the world, and technology; and literacies refer to the socially and materially situated practices, structured by relations of power, through which both are actualized, negotiated, and contested. On this basis, the synthesis provides a theoretical rationale for the claim that access, accessibility, and epistemic representation are not merely secondary implementation issues but rather constitute the conditions of possibility for postdigital educational and participatory processes. For research and media didactics, such a perspective implies the need to focus not primarily on technical performance, but rather on the reasoned capacities for relational interpretation, engagement with contradictions, and collective shaping within sociotechnically pre-structured contexts of action.