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Automated decision-making is a process in which an algorithm collects and analyses data, derives information, applies this information, and recommends an action, at times using forms of Artificial Intelligence (Richardson 2021). This paper proposes that we need to locate automated decision-making as part of the history of educational policy and governance, as well as increasingly networked cultural records or digital archives. As such, we explore the history and present of automated decision systems across a range of cultural records spanning several categories: data, algorithm, and AI-based technologies; innovation and industry; philanthropy and funding; policy and legislation; spatiality and socioeconomics; plus, activism, and communities. To do so, we created an interdisciplinary archival heuristic as a research tool to retrace these interrelated cultural records shaping data infrastructure and inequalities. We then tested this tool in the context of the school admission matching algorithm in New York City. Our central aim is to help counter discourses about the newness and efficiencies of introducing automation and algorithms across education reform initiatives. The education counter-archiving heuristic introduced therefore offers a novel research tool to explore the intersecting history, present, and future of automated decision-making systems, such as school choice algorithms.

In this analytical essay, part of Harvard Educational Review’s symposium on Platform Studies in Education, Ben Williamson, Kalervo N. Gulson, Carlo Perrotta, and Kevin Witzenberger argue that global technology companies have begun acting as governance organizations in education. Their analysis focuses on the global technology company Amazon, which has begun penetrating education through a connective architecture of digital infrastructure and platform services. Looking at Amazon technical documentation and publicly available materials, the authors identify and examine five interlocking governance operations and their effects: inscribing commercial business models on the education sector, habituating educational users to Amazon technologies, creating new interfaces with educational institutions, platforming third-party education providers on the cloud, and seeking market dominance over provision and control of key information infrastructures of education. In showing how Amazon is potentially developing infrastructural dominance in the education sector as part of its transformation into a statelike corporation with significant social, technical, economic, and political power to govern and control state and public services, this article highlights the broader implications of increasing technological governance in education.

Research on Artificial Intelligence, especially in the field of machine learning, has exploded in the twenty-first century. AI research in universities has long been funded by a combination of gove...

Pre-emption describes a system of automated knowledge creation and intervention that steers the present towards a desirable future, by building on knowledge derived from the past. Folding together ...

Exploring case studies of data infrastructures, facial recognition, and the use of data science in education, Algorithms of Education maps the political and methodological directions for engaging with datafication and artificial intelligence in education governance. According to the authors, we must go beyond debates that separate humans and machines to develop new strategies for, and a new politics of, education.

Digital platforms have become central to interaction and participation in contemporary societies. New forms of ‘platformized education’ are rapidly proliferating across education systems, bringing ...

This paper analyses how precision has become a ubiquitous prefix in medicine, agriculture and education. The accompanying imagination in each of these domains is that “data” will enable greater pre...

This paper claims it is impossible to tame Artificial Intelligence in education. The paper is not advocating that AI should be used in an unfettered way in education. Rather, the paper suggests that despite ongoing policy attempts to regulate AI, these policy moves are unlikely to succeed due to a synthesis of machines and humans in education governance. The paper briefly outlines attempts to tame AI, and proposes that rather than considering taming AI, a new politics of education may be necessary.

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. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

While artificial intelligence (AI) is not yet widespread in education, there are two positions that are being adopted in reference to already existing and speculative applications of AI in different areas of education. The first is that AI will intensify, complement, and supplement already existing practices and processes in education. The second position is that AI is predicted to bring substantive disruptions to educational processes and practices. This chapter contributes to this discussion by examining the introduction of AI into education through the framework of disruption and intensification. The chapter looks at the ways education could be disrupted in relation to: (1) the provision of education, including who will offer education, how it will be offered, and revenue implications; (2) the challenge of AI to the role of platforms and standards; and (3) the challenges to educational knowledge and expertise. We examine intensification in relation to: (1) the idea that organization of education is pre-automated and (2) that datafication and data infrastructures enable conditions for introducing automation. This chapter concludes that like other areas of social and political life, decisions about the uses of AI in education need to be enlarged beyond considerations of what is technically possible.

Introduction (Networked Learning Editorial Collective): Since the turn of this century, much of the world has undergone a tectonic socio-technological change. Computers have left the isolated basements of research institutes and entered people's homes. Network connectivity has advanced from slow and unreliable modems to high-speed broadband. Devices have evolved: from stationary desktop computers to ever-present, always-connected smartphones. These developments have been accompanied by new digital practices, and changing expectations, not least in education, where enthusiasm for digital technologies has been kindled by quite contrasting sets of values. For example, some critical pedagogues working in the traditions of Freire and Illich have understood computers as novel tools for political and social emancipation, while opportunistic managers in cash-strapped universities have seen new opportunities for saving money and/or growing revenues. Irrespective of their ideological leanings, many of the early attempts at marrying technology and education had some features in common: instrumentalist understanding of human relationships with technologies, with a strong emphasis on practice and 'what works'. It is now clear that, in many countries, managerialist approaches have provided the framing, while local constraints and exigencies have shaped operational details, in fields such as e-learning, Technology Enhanced Learning, and others waving the 'Digital' banner. Too many emancipatory educational movements have ignored technology, burying their heads in the sand, or have wished it away, subscribing toa new form of Luddism, even as they sense themselves moving to the margins. But this situation is not set in stone. Our postdigital reality results from a complex interplay between centres and margins. Furthermore, the concepts of centres and margins 'have morphed into formations that we do not yet understand, and they have created (power) relationships which are still unsettled. The concepts … have not disappeared, but they have become somewhat marginal in their own right.' (Jandrić andHayes 2019) Social justice and emancipation are as important as ever, yet they require new theoretical reconfigurations and practices fit for our socio-technological moment. In the 1990s, networked learning (NL) emerged as a critical response to dominant discourses of the day. NL went against the grain in two main ways. First, it embarked on developing nuanced understandings of relationships between humans and technologies; understandings which reach beyond instrumentalism and various forms of determinism. Second, NL embraced the emancipatory agenda of the critical pedagogy movement and has, in various ways, politically committed to social justice (Beaty et al. 2002; Networked Learning Editorial Collective 2020). Gathered around the biennial Networked Learning Conference,1 the Research in NetworkedLearning book series,2 and a series of related projects and activities, the NL community has left a significant trace in educational transformations over the last few decades. Twenty years ago, founding members of the NL community offered a definition of NL which has strongly influenced the NL community’s theoretical perspectives and research approaches (Goodyear et al. 2004).3 Since then, however, the world has radically changed. With this in mind, the Networked Learning Editorial Collective (NLEC) recently published a paper entitled 'Networked Learning: InvitingRedefinition' (2020). In line with NL's critical agenda, a core goal for the paper was to open up a broad discussion about the current meaning and understandings of NL and directions for its further development. The current collectively authored paper presents the responses to the NLEC's open call. With 40 contributors coming from six continents and working across many fields of education, the paper reflects the breadth and depth of current understandings of NL. The responses have been collated, classified into main themes, and lightly edited for clarity. One of the responders, Sarah Hayes, was asked to write aconclusion. The final draft paper has undergone double open review. The reviewers, Laura Czerniewicz and Jeremy Knox, are acknowledged as authors. Our intention, in taking this approach, has been to further stimulate democratic discussion about NL and to prompt some much-needed community-building. lict

New cognitive infrastructures are emerging as digital platforms and artificial intelligence enable new forms of automated thinking that shape human decision-making. This paper (a) offers a new theoretical perspective on automated thinking in education policy and (b) illustrates how automated thinking is emerging in one specific policy context. We report on a case study of a policy analysis unit (‘The Centre’) in an Australian state education department that has been implementing a BI strategy since 2013. The Centre is now focused on using BI to support complex decision making and improve learning outcomes, and their strategy describes this focus as becoming ‘information centric’. The theoretical framework for our analysis draws on infrastructure studies and philosophy of technology, particularly Luciana Parisi’s recent work on automated thinking. We analyse technical documentation and semi-structured interview data to describe the enactment of a BI strategy in The Centre, with a focus on how new approaches to data analytics are shaping decision-making. Our analysis shows that The Centre is developing a cognitive infrastructure that is already creating new conditions for education policy making, and we conclude with a call for research designs that enable pragmatic exploration of what these infrastructures can do. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In this special issue response paper, we pick up from prior discussions to suggest areas where we think policy sociology can benefit from further conversation and research. In particular, we bring together our respective readings and work on policy mobilities, in conversation with the contributions of this special issue, to think further about what policy mobilities and related orientations can bring to the development of policy sociology. We specifically focus our attention on four areas for further conceptual and methodological extension in relation to policy mobilities and related approaches in policy sociology of education: (i) temporality, (ii) scale, (iii) land, and, finally, (iv) methodological diversity. In doing so, we advocate against ‘fast’ readings of literature from other fields, while emphasizing the value of transdisciplinary work in policy sociology and critical policy studies.

Education has long been a space of in which knowledge was created through data practices. But the ongoing datafication and digitalisation has made new forms of datafied knowledge production within educational research possible. This new form of datafied knowledge creation has shifted the sites of expertise and the authority to create educational knowledge to a more-than-human network. This panel conceptually and empirically examines the possibilities and implications that arise from the entanglement of education with advanced media such as ubiquitous sensory environments, APIs, machine learning, and codes. The panel shows how the idea of measurable and re-configurable bodies of students is being performed and stabilized through trade shows and academic conferences; it moves towards a critical analysis of different applications of facial recognition in education and the role of doubt in machine learning methods; it shows the complex involvement of advanced learning analytics through a critical examination of interrelated studies in behavioural genetics and genoeconomics looking for associations between genes and educational outcomes through bioinformatic methods; and, it examines learning and living spaces that create a situation of ubiquitous sensation and explores interventions to disrupt the technical milieu. What connects these papers is more than the spaces, ideas and practices that surround education. All contributions look at datafied knowledge about human life – whether in behavioural, physiological, emotional, or genetic form. The panel aims to show what critical education research has adopted from other disciplines, but also show how it can contribute to the wider discourse around science, technology and society.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly posited as a key aspect of new education governance, built into everything from business intelligence platforms to real-time online testing. In this paper we are interested in the work an education trade show does to legitimate and support the use of AI in education governance, or more precisely, automated education governance. Automated education governance covers policy practices that are exercised by automated decision-making machines, and instances in which software has a governing role within education, mainly through the application of narrow forms of Artificial Intelligence. We aim to investigate the education technology trade show not only as a set of relations, and to see what work a trade show does it do in incorporating, legitimating, and propping up AI use in education. We propose that an education technology show helps to constitute an automated education governance assemblage, and creates and legitimises certain forms of educational governing practices around data generation, analysis and use that includes AI. We outline this argument using examples of off the shelf solutions, partnerships between Australian education technology companies providing student information system products and major global companies, and as part of start-up pitches for venture capital support. We conclude the paper by examining the limits of automated governance and identifying how AI is part of power and desire in education governance.

This article examines the history of a similarity measure—the Mahalanobis Distance Function—and its movement from colonial India into contemporary artificial intelligence technologies, including facial recognition, and its reapplication into postcolonial India. The article identifies how the creation of the Distance Function was connected to the colonial “problem” of caste and ethnic classification for British bureaucracy in 1920-1930s India. This article demonstrates that the Distance Function is a statistical method, originating to make anthropometric caste distinctions in India, that became both a technical standard and a mobile racialized technique, utilized in machine learning applications. The creation of the Distance Function as a measure of “similitude” at a particular period of colonial state-making helped to model wider categories of classification which have proliferated in facial recognition technology. Overall, we highlight how a measurement function that operates in recognition technologies today can be traced across time and space to other racialized contexts.

Drawing on the aesthetic theory of Jacques Ranciere 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, Ranciere 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 Ranciere 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 subjec...

In this paper, we are interested in the notion of multiple ways of thinking, knowing and transforming life, namely an increasing capacity to intervene in ‘life’ as a ‘molecular biopolitics’...

Contemporary education policy involves the integration of novel forms of data and the creation of new data platforms, in addition to the infusion of business principles into school governance netwo...

This special issue contributes to scholarship on critical geographies of education (Kraftl, 2013a) along with research that has emerged as a result of the spatial turn in educational studies (Gulson & Symes, 2007; Helfenbein & Taylor, 2009). Such research had proceeded through a variety of subdisciplinary lenses in human geography, including political, urban, social, and cultural geographies (see Holloway et al., 2010; Kraftl, 2014). Moreover, scholarship outside geography has increasingly adopted, refined, and retheorised geographical tropes in respect of diverse education spaces (Brooks et al., 2012; Gulson & Symes, 2007). Collectively, this work seeks to map the recursive production of education, space, and society as a form of boundary crossing in the sense described by Massey (1999, p.5) for whom ‘some of the most stimulating intellectual developments of recent years have come either from new, hybrid places or from places where boundaries between disciplines have been constructively breached and new conversations have taken place’.

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. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In this article, we problematize the establishment of an Africentric Alternative School in Toronto, Canada. We argue that policy, and race and racializations cannot be understood outside of, or immune to, neoliberalism. We contend that policy is a form of racial biopolitics, and race is now produced through neoliberal markets, in conjunction with earlier, liberal categories. We conclude that neoliberalism has produced new forms of racial biopolitics; whereas the state is much less overtly involved in producing and arranging racializations. Instead, neoliberal education policy has transferred or downloaded these forms of racial biopolitics onto populations which are now “free” and “empowered” to produce and maintain variable raciologies.

More than a decade ago, the topic of poststructural policy analysis in education formed the basis of a 2003 special issue for the Journal of Education Policy (JEP) (Volume 18, Number 2). While by n...

For a new editorial team, Research in Education appears to provide a clear and obvious mandate – to publish challenging, well-written and theoretically innovative contributions to ongoing debates in Education, as well as generating fresh ideas and outlining new directions in Education research. Yet when one begins to think seriously about these three seemingly simple words, complexity arises. The UK government’s Research Excellence Framework defines research as ‘a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared’ (http://www.ref.ac.uk/media/ref/content/pub/assessmentframeworkandguidanceonsubmissions/ GOS%20including%20addendum.pdf). But while few would disagree with the importance of notions of originality, significance and rigour in relation to research, what is missing here is a sense of how research is also a rhetorical activity grounded in the use of particular assumptions and techniques in order to construct arguments that will be deemed authoritative and persuasive by particular audiences. Such a perspective foregrounds the differential and contested nature of research, highlighting how practices and assumptions that are deemed legitimate in one community of scholars, such as an emphasis on methodological rigour and transparency as a guarantee of research validity, may be deeply problematic to another community, that, for example, embraces a poststructuralist perspective foregrounding the pervasive and inescapable element of power relations as part and parcel of any claims to knowledge.

This edited collection examines the ways in which the local and global are key to understanding race and racism in the intersectional context of contemporary education. Analysing a broad range of examples, it highlights how race and racism is a relational phenomenon, that interconnects local, national and global contexts and ideas. The current educational climate is subject to global influences and the effects of conservative, hyper-nationalist politics and neoliberal economic rationalising in local settings that are creating new formations of race and racism. While focused predominantly on Australia and southern world or settler colonial contexts, the book aims to constructively contribute to broader emerging research and debates about race and education. Through the adoption of a relational framing, it draws the Australian context into the global conversation about race and racism in education in ways that challenge and test current understandings of the operation of race and racism in contemporary social and educational spaces. Importantly, it also pushes debates about race and racism in education and research to the foreground in Australia where such debates are typically dismissed or cursorily engaged. The book will guide readers as they navigate issues of race in education research and practice, and its chapters will serve as provocations designed to assist in critically understanding this challenging field. It reaches beyond education scholarship, as concerns to do with race remain intertwined with wider social justice issues such as access to housing, health, social/economic mobility, and political representation.

The final chapter concludes the book by examining some of the effects of problematizing ideas of race, racism, equity and so forth, and explicitly takes on the challenges that emerge when education policy is constituted by contradiction, incompleteness, and indeterminacy. The chapter revisits the key concepts of the book (events, biopolitics, race, cities, neoliberalism, difference) and places them within variegated histories of inequality and what alternatives policy scholars might consider in relation to these histories, and potential futures.

Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community. The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.

The chapter provides readers with a brief background to the study, including an orientation to the theoretical and methodological approaches used in the research. The chapter outlines how the book is organized, including brief introductions to each of the six chapters that comprise the book. The chapter concludes by informing readers about the purpose of each subtext that accompanies each chapter, and the reasons for reflecting and problematizing each chapter.

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*There is an extensive literature, over the course of 25 years, that identifies neoliberalism as a political-economic theory that utilises the efficiencies of market economics to develop and legitimate government priorities and practices. Neoliberalism also promotes forms of social organisation that emphasise individuals’ freedom of choice, and has emphasised ways to increase the educational choices of those who have been racialised as Black or African American. Neoliberalism calls for ‘freedom’, mostly understood in relation to the rights of the individual to market participation and of markets themselves to operate without interference from the state (...

*The ways that difference is produced and reconfigured through and due to race connects cities and education (Gulson, 2011; Lipman, 2011). Schools and policy are, furthermore, part of urban networks that ‘are complex: they interact and interfere with each other in ways which are not predictable and which produce ...

*Why would we describe the becoming of the Afrocentric Alternative School as an event? What is an event? The preferred term of ‘case study’ would likely be more applicable qua educational research. We might drill further and describe our account as a particularistic case study, or as a ...

This chapter examines the event of finding a location for the school, and examine the connections between the ways in which the city was (and is) racialized and undergoing urban change around gentrification and the rebranding of neighbourhoods. The question about ‘where to put the Black school in the White city’ would produce strong feelings across Toronto given its long and troubled histories with placements of non-White populations (and in relation to each other). The argument within is based upon the idea that the question of location affected the entire process of the becoming of the school rather than just at the ‘end’ of a rational and sequential process. That is, the question ‘haunted’ Trustees and community members prior to any governance and policy-development activities designed to produce the school.

This chapter connects race-based violence, ideas of counting and race-based statistics, with ideas about racial biopolitics. The focus is on two events. The first is a 2008 a report into school safety, the Falconer Report, which urged for the use of ‘race-based statistics’ in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which reignited the overall move towards Black-focused schooling. We connect this report, and its plea to use race-based statistics in discipline related incidents in schooling, to racial profiling and policing in Toronto in the early 2000s. The chapter concludes with the TDSB decision in 2004-5, to collect race-based statistics, as a second policy event that preceded the Falconer Report.

*The debate about race-based statistics in Toronto constituted a politics of educational recognition via the imbrication of calculation with governance. There was an evident tension between the kinds of racism that were not ‘accounted’ for, and how raciologies were practised and perpetuated in education as part of anti-racist attempts....