Stephen Petrina is a Media and Technology Studies specialist and cultural historian. He is a Professor (Media & Technology Studies) in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. He has advised to completion over 60 Masters and PhD students and has 100+ interdisciplinary publications. Currently he is exploring the interconnections between digital media and learning and is Director of the How We Learn Media & Technology (Across the Lifespan) lab and project. The emphasis is on design and engineering cognition.
Actively researching academic freedom, he is co-Editor (with E. Wayne Ross) of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor and blogs with Wayne at the Workplace blog. He is co-founder and co-Director, with Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross, of the Institute for Critical Education Studies.
Other projects include books titled Technology, Religion, Spirituality and the Sacred, Techontologies: The Critical Ontology of Media and Technology, Twentieth Century Learning, and Education, Medicine, and the Psy-ences. This fourth book includes a major article titled “Medical Liberty” published in the December 2008 issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities.
Recent major articles or chapters include an analysis of the critique of critique (a la Latour and Ranciere) in The New Critiquette and Old Scholactivism: A Petit Critique of Academic Manners, Managers, Matters, and Freedom and an entirely new paradigm for new media and technologies in “Postliterate Machineries.” This latest chapter basically spells the end of new literacies.
Dr. Petrina has also published a textbook titled Advanced Teaching Methods for the Technology Classroom (2007) and a collection of essays on the critical theory of design and technology education. Recent articles appear in the History of Education Quarterly (e.g., “Preschools for Science,” award winning article with Penney Clark and Mona Gleason), History of Psychology, Technology and Culture and the International Journal of Technology and Design Education.