The Digital Poverty and Inclusion Research Group
The Digital Poverty and Inclusion Research Group is dedicated to advancing research that addresses digital inequality through rights-based and inclusive approaches. Bringing together expertise across accessibility, equity, participation, and social justice, the group examines the barriers that shape digital inclusion and the opportunities for creating more equitable digital futures. The articles below, authored by the group's researchers and collaborators, showcase this ongoing work and contribute to critical conversations on digital poverty, accessibility, inclusion, and digital rights.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers potential benefits for students with hidden disabilities like dyslexia but also risks exacerbating inequities due to digital poverty and commercial bias. This paper explores how commercial interests shape access to AI tools for students with dyslexia. Using the social model of disability, we critique how commercial influences shape access to assistive AI technologies through four speculative scenarios. The first scenario highlights exploitative commercial practices driving inequities, the second inadequate institutional policies failing to address digital poverty, the third insufficient accountability among developers prioritizing profit over fairness, and fourth weak government oversight lacking safeguards against commercial bias. We advocate for inclusive AI governance that recognizes the interconnected dynamics of human, technological, and commercial power.
This paper interrogates the challenges that deepfake media and AI-generated synthetic content pose for educational policy, governance, and the evolving notion of classroom safety. Moving beyond traditional paradigms that center student welfare and physical security, the analysis foregrounds the neglected psychosocial risks facing teachers, whose occupational safety is increasingly threatened by gendered forms of digitally mediated violence. Drawing on Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology and Manne’s analysis of misogyny, I situate deepfake harms within broader structural inequalities and neoliberal logics that commodify both teacher and student identities. Using Rahm’s concept of “educational imaginaries,” the paper presents two vignettes. The first shows how teachers face new OHS risks through real-time, technology-enabled abuse.
This article highlights the challenges faced in educating pre-service science teachers in a post-truth era informed by the widespread presence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). It examines a significant challenge associated with integrating artificial intelligence into educational methods, where the consequences of GenAI’s tendency to generate hallucinations highlight tensions around the fundamental nature of truth in the field of Science Education. The paper argues that the conventional linear model of knowledge creation and dissemination is inadequate for addressing the complexities linked to evaluating and instructing science in an era marked by the prevalence of generated ‘facts’. By advocating for the educating of science teachers through the conceptual lens of technical agonism, the article presents a framework for the emerging skills that pre-service science teachers need to navigate AI through a rights based approach.
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a sudden shift to online teaching and learning in higher education institutions. This abrupt transition had a significant impact on both students and staff. In this article, the author discusses how three academics identified students who were experiencing digital poverty and implemented trauma-responsive strategies as emergency mitigation measures. Through post qualitative inquiry, the author explores the collective narrative of these academics and uncovers unfinished conversations related to digital poverty and trauma in blended learning as 'hidden' needs often not considered in the discourse around the ways we develop accessibility technologies. Findings from research, include the recognition of hidden needs related to divergent identities of staff and students, as well as the importance of prioritising safety and efficacy in remote learning spaces.
This encyclopedia entry details the intersection of deepfake technology and draws on the potential of taking a queering approach to interrogate the evolving concept of synthetic media and to narrate the concept and usage of deepfake technology. Queering as critical exploration can productively challenge the broader neoliberal patriarchy. The introduction of deepfake technology and the increased shift towards a Metaverse means questions about the intersection of intra-action with more than human imaginaries are increasingly salient. Technological systems globally are incorporating and disseminating AI generated images and videos that are generating a moral panic of the potential for psychosocial harm.
Using Judith Butler’s theory of performative subjection, this paper explores the issue of digital poverty in Initial Teacher Education and the need for new forms of agency and advocacy to address it. The concept of digital agency (DA) and educational data advocacy (EDA) are discussed as possible ameliorating concepts for digital poverty and the increasing digital divide in Initial Teacher Education (ITE). In this theoretical paper, the authors employ the concept of DA alongside EDA specifically in the context of learners in university settings where technology is often used but the level of autonomy that students experience might vary considerably. Drawing on the context of Australian Initial Teacher Education programs, the paper calls for greater advocacy around the potential for forms of discrimination, inequity, and prejudice perpetuated as a result of digital poverty.
Educational apps and platforms that utilize predictive analytics are becoming increasingly common in higher education. While these tools offer valuable insights into student learning and provide recommendations for educators, they also introduce significant concerns about algorithmic bias, which can perpetuate discrimination, inequity, and prejudice. This chapter draws on the Australian Robodebt harms, where automated systems incorrectly calculated welfare debt, causing severe physical and mental harm to many individuals to explore the implications of algorithmic bias within educational systems globally. It conceptually analyses how such biases can manifest in initial teacher education programs, leading to indirect forms of discrimination and impacting human rights.
Australian universities are operating in an environment where artificial intelligence is increasingly relevant to portfolio governance, delivery assurance, and institutional risk, across teaching, research, student services, workforce systems, and enterprise platforms. This working paper is written for senior university leaders with responsibility for enterprise governance, portfolio oversight, and organisational assurance. Its purpose is to provide a practical, leadership-facing governance framing that supports clear decision-making as AI capability becomes embedded across institutional operations. The paper introduces a portfolio governance mnemonic, with AI, without AI, and about AI, to support executive sensemaking across diverse initiatives and delivery contexts. This framing enables leaders to clarify decision rights, test continuity and resilience, and ensure accountability is maintained when AI is enabled, paused, declined, or contested. Through realistic university scenarios, the paper demonstrates how AI-related risks materialise in practice at the intersections of governance, workforce consultation, data stewardship, vendor relationships, and institutional voice, and how these risks can be managed through anticipatory governance. Situated within Australia’s National AI Plan and existing legal and regulatory frameworks, the paper shows how anticipatory governance of AI for education, is enacted through established instruments such as portfolio management, workforce consultation, incident escalation, data governance, and assurance reporting.
The purpose of this scoping rapid review was to identify and analyse existing qualitative methodologies that have been used to investigate K-12 teachers' lived experiences of adult cyber abuse as a result of student content “going viral” to propose a novel methodological stance incorporating the Australian Online Safety Act 2021. A search of Google Scholar was conducted using keywords and phrases related to cyber trauma, teachers, qualitative methods and the Online Safety Act. Inclusion criteria for the review were: (1) published in English, (2) focused on teachers' experiences of online abuse and cyberbullying associated with viral posts and (3) employed a qualitative inquiry methodology. Full-text articles were obtained for those that met the inclusion criteria.