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This paper examines how datafication is creating new topologies of education policy. Specifically, we analyse how the creation of data infrastructures that enable the generation, communication and representation of digital data are changing relations of power, including both centralised and dispersed forms, and space in education. The paper uses conceptual resources from cultural topology and infrastructure studies to provide a framework for analysing spatial relations between educational data, discourses, policies and practices in new governance configurations. The paper outlines a case study of an emergent data infrastructure in Australian schooling, the National Schools Interoperability Program, to provide empirical evidence of the movement, connection and enactment of digital data across policy spaces. Key aspects of this case include the ways that data infrastructure is: (i) enabling new private and public connections across policy topologies; (ii) creating a new role for technical standards in education policy and (iii) changing the topological spaces of education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a broad impetus across policy and institutional domains to expand public engagement and involvement with emerging technology research and innovation. Yet innovative theory, methods, and practices to critically explore algorithmic system controversies and democratic possibilities are still in nascent form. In this paper, we bring together thinking about public pedagogy, infrastructuring, and democratic design to introduce a novel pedagogic encounters toolkit, where pedagogic encounters are defined as: opportunities for learning together about the emergence, relationality, and uncertainty of algorithmic system controversies. A framework with accompanying practices and examples is outlined for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to creatively and critically explore these pedagogic encounters within specific contexts. We conclude with implications for future investigations attentive to making democratic designs in a datafied society. In doing so, this paper informs theoretical and methodological innovation to the study of algorithmic system controversies and democratising technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to Michael Peters' paper in this issue, specifically the articulation of the economic in the non-economic parts of contemporary life, and the explication of neoliberalism in governnmentality inspired work. We do this by focusing on the field of New Political Economy, and suggest that education policy analysis that focuses on cultural politics, mobility and the market, could be considered as part of the new political economy of education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the aims and scope of the journal "Research in Education." This include publishing difference and multiplicity in terms of conceptions of education; diverse approaches to research, rather than being dominated by work located within any single specific research tradition; and awareness of the pervasive politics and policy dimensions of education.

The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based technologies, including algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and tracking technologies [Fenwick, T., E. Mangez, and J. Ozga. 2014. Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education. New York, NY: Routledge]. New forms of datafication and automation enable governments and other powerful stakeholders to draw from the past to construct images of educational futures in order to steer the present. This paper examines the competing conceptions of time and temporality that AI posits for policy and practice when used to anticipate educational futures. We argue that most educational futures are already delineated, and machinic expressions of time are the chronologies, habits, and memories that the educated subject inhabits rather than produces. If resetting educational habits and memories can be an alternative to algorithmic anticipations of education then we believe, paradoxically, that machines may help to reset them by accelerating them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière and the Lacanian conception of lack, this paper offers an intervention into the notion of subjectivity which can be applied in critical studies of education. Critiquing the progressive and knowledge-oriented ideology of neoliberal systems, Rancière depicts a world in which politics turns out to delimit the subject’s perceptual experience and in this way, argues that what remains out of this ideological demarcation is susceptible to a challenge of the social order on which an ideology is based. While Rancière presents a meticulous reading of current pedagogic institutions, Lacan provides us with a definition of subject having the capacity to challenge the delimiting social order. The latter is achieved by theorising a subject inflicted by a double lack, realised both at the subjective and objective levels. This double negativity gives rise to the emergence of desire in the subject which in Lacan is the source of emancipation as it makes the subject not be satisfied by a given achievement, hence replacing one desire after another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]