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Ron Darvin

The University of British Columbia, Canada

The articles gathered in this special issue vividly demonstrate how the model of investment has been mobilized to interrogate both online and offline spaces, and how the act of investing in discursive practices is always contextualized, situated, and contingent. Whether learners configure their engagement amidst AI-mediated “digital wilds,” in bilingual preschool classrooms, elite universities, or constrained sociopolitical landscapes, investment emerges as a dynamic, emergent process negotiated through shifting relations of power.
 

What follows elaborates three cross-cutting themes evident across the nine pieces: (1) identity as embodied and imagined, structured across time and space while oriented to futures; (2) resources/ capital as unevenly distributed, yet open to reframing through agentive negotiation; and (3) ideology as embedded across offline, online, and human–AI interactions, where struggles over legitimacy and value become sites of competing agencies. I conclude by arguing for the analytic and pedagogical value of "invest" as a verb, foregrounding the continuous, situated activity of becoming, especially in a world where online/offline boundaries have eroded and where patterns of control increasingly operate in invisible ways.