Conference Agenda

Policy frameworks such as the European Commission's Digital Compass for 2030 and the Flemish STEM-Agenda 2030 position education as a vehicle for preparing citizens to keep pace with rapid technological transformation. These initiatives frame digital skills as prerequisites for social inclusion, employability, and active citizenship, thereby embedding an urgency narrative within educational discourse. This paper critically examines the temporal logic underpinning STEAM education policy and investigates how learners experience attention, curiosity, and temporal rhythm when engaging with generative artificial intelligence.

Drawing on Hartmut Rosa's theory of social acceleration, this study argues that the imperative to accelerate learning carries significant educational risks. Rosa identifies technological acceleration as a fundamental characteristic of modernity that alters human experience of time and produces alienation from the world. When education becomes instrumentalised to fuel innovation cycles, it risks undermining conditions necessary for meaningful learning: sustained attention, genuine curiosity, and resonant engagement. As generative AI becomes increasingly embedded in educational practice, understanding how these technologies shape learners' temporal experience and attentional capacities becomes imperative. The central question guiding this research is how learners describe and enact attention, curiosity, and slowing down when interacting with generative AI.

The study develops a theoretical framework synthesising post-humanist scholarship on worldly engagement. Drawing on Anna Tsing's arts of noticing, Donna Haraway's tentacular attentiveness, Bruno Latour's actor-network sensitivity, and Tim Ingold's dwelling perspective, the framework articulates interconnected dispositions: noticing (becoming aware of previously unattended aspects), naming (the linguistic act sharpening perception), attention (focused directing of awareness), attentiveness (a disposition of openness and responsiveness), curiosity (an exploratory orientation resisting premature closure), and deliberate slowing down through sensory engagement. These concepts provide analytical resources for examining how human-AI interaction either enables or forecloses present-centred engagement with the world.

The empirical component employs participatory action research to investigate how participants describe their experience of attention, curiosity, and temporal rhythm when engaging with generative AI. Through structured protocols comparing physical sensory tasks with AI-mediated activities, the study captures both participant accounts and observable interaction patterns. Video recordings enable detailed analysis of interactional rhythms—the temporal patterning of engagement, waiting, disengagement, and re-engagement that characterises human-GenAI encounters. Participant discussions provide first-person descriptions of how attention shifts, where curiosity is directed, and whether slowing down feels possible within digital interactions.

Initial findings reveal a significant tension between embodied engagement and AI-mediated interaction. Participants described physical protocols as inviting sustained, curious attention, whereas GenAI interaction was characterised by what participants termed a narrowing of experience and an orientation toward output rather than process. Analysis of video recordings shows distinctive temporal patterns: physical engagement exhibited flowing, recursive rhythms, while AI interaction alternated between hasty input and passive waiting, often accompanied by visible impatience and disengagement. These preliminary observations suggest that generative AI may reproduce acceleration dynamics unless deliberately countered through pedagogical design. The paper concludes by proposing that understanding learner experience of attention, attentiveness and curiosity, offers essential insights for developing STEAM pedagogies that resist acceleration while meaningfully integrating digital technologies.

Critique in the social sciences has long been under assault, even from within (Latour, 2004; Sayer, 2009). Today, as UK universities formally expand business partnerships with Big Tech (e.g. Gomes, 2026; Wall, 2026), there are continuing concerns around dependence on this very same Big Tech and its implications for education. There are epistemic concerns related to technology’s impact on learning, with studies that rely on quantitative methods to show impact on cognitive outcomes (e.g. Bastani et al., 2025; Simone et al., 2025).

This coincides with a related increase in critique of dominant narratives and practices in technology and education, most notably with the launch of the European Conference on Critical Edtech Studies in 2025. Alongside this are discussions on the viability of critique and critical pedagogy. On the one hand, some philosophers of education make an attempt to move beyond the politics of education, with a concomitant need to produce affirmative modes of educational research (Hodgson, 2020, 2020), which has also been taking up in critical edtech research (Selwyn, 2023), under the banner of a ‘post-critical’ turn.

This paper takes another position, calling for an ethics of care applied to critical edtech studies (CES). The paper pursues two directions: first, I describe how care has been historically mobilised, both epistemically and in practice, drawing on the work of Science and Technology Studies philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 2017) to demonstrate how Latourian critiques of the social sciences can be addressed, without disposing of critique entirely. Far from rejecting what critics call the overt political focus in educational research (Hodgson, 2020), I bring to bear the work of Joan Tronto, using care as a challenge to existing society-wide moral dilemmas, while emphasising how care can help reframe political issues (Tronto, 2015).

The second part of the paper follows from a shift from ‘matters of concern’ towards ‘matters of care,’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011), a shift which insists not only on an ethos of respectful knowledge production, but also a way to engage and intervene. Such an approach is itself the subject of recent anthropological research, including explicit attempts to move beyond the idea research subjects towards “epistemic partners” and more collaborative experiences that work to create ‘complicit solidarity’ (Marcus, 2021). This is further to discussion of the breakdown of constructed field binaries, bridging historical discussions (Marcus, 1995) with more recent explorations of ‘patchy’ research (Jobson, 2020).

To do this, I document a pair of experimental forms of ‘care-ful’ engagement with two distinct education publics, as I attempt to implement an ethics of care that takes humans and other-than-humans seriously. The first is a vignette-led discussion that took place amidst a larger Community of Practice associated with the project under which I am completing my PhD. The second example is an attempt to translate critical research into a form of engagement that can communicate across and between sites and sectors. Both of these stand in contrast to critiques of the ‘disseminate to’ model of education research (Moss, 2024).

This paper explores the relationship between knowing and acting, entangled in the politics and anxieties around critique and critical fatigue, specifically in the field of European (critical) education research. I use this paper to explore the question of what care can bring to the table, both theoretically and empirically, using other forms of engagement that embody ‘matters of care’. Amidst a state of ongoing crisis, and the technological imperative represented by AI in education, I document several attempts to bring ethnographic research into new forms of dialogue and interaction with education publics.

With the digitalisation boost brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) in education and schooling, the question of who produces knowledge in schools becomes more complex and ambiguous to answer. As critical studies of educational technologies (edtech) have pointed out, private and profit-driven actors such as Big Tech, edtech producers, and intermediaries play an important role in the discourses about the goals and futures of education (Hartong, 2016; Joecks, 2024; Kerssens & van Dijck, 2021; Williamson, 2022). With the growing implementation of digital infrastructures in schools, their influence on what is being taught and how, on how knowledge is being presented and structured, and on how learning outcomes and processes are to be assessed, is growing rapidly.

In the European context, the edtech ecosystem is not only producing technology and knowledge. It is also lobbying for European standards, interoperability, and evidence based impact of edtech, as the European EdTech Alliance claims (2025), therefor actively influencing digital infrastructures and policy-making in education. Especially with the genAI boom, new public-private partnerships and genAI education projects have developed, with Big Tech and genAI companies cooperating with public education actors in Europe (e.g. for the Netherlands, see Dingemanse, 2025; for Estonia see OpenAI, 2025) and a big wave of new genAI startups flooding the European edtech market. The companies creating genAI-driven edtech products promise to make teachers life easier and workload bearable through the use of genAI. This becomes especially visible when we look at genAI-powered grading and feedback tools which promise, e.g. to ‘make more time for what really counts’, ‘individualising learning’ and ‘erasing the human bias’ by automating assessment processes.

Researching how, by whom, and especially under which prerogatives edtech is being built, can be one way to untangle the complex dynamics of ever-changing knowledge-making processes in education. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), in particular the approach of ‘epistemic cultures’ as introduced by the scholar Karin Knorr Cetina (1999, 2007), this contribution seeks to investigate “machineries of knowing” (Knorr Cetina 2007, p. 363) by investigating the practices and cultures present in knowledge creation, i.e. focussing on “the construction of the machineries of knowledge construction” (ibid, p. 363).

When it comes to genAI assessment tools, this perspective opens up the debate about how genAI grading technologies seek to create knowledge about student performance, by examining what practices bring these technologies into being and which socially negotiated ideas about learning and teaching play a part in their genesis. As edtech companies become more influential knowledge-producing actors in educational settings, it is important to have a closer look at the production processes, to uncover why some pedagogical approaches prevail over others when edtech is being made. With this in mind, my contribution asks: What “machineries of knowledge construction” are present in the making of genAI-based educational technologies that aim to digitally enhance the pedagogical practice of grading? And which “machineries of knowing” are creating are these machineries?

To answer these research questions, my study looks at this phenomenon through an ethnographic case study of an edtech startup in Germany, analysing it in the bigger context of the German and European edtech startup ecosystem. In doing so, my contribution will be taking a critical perspective on edtech. It will be focussing on overarching systemic and social dynamics, with a sensitivity for sociotechnical entanglements and a scepticism for data-driven practices and paradigms as present in the field of Critical Data Studies.

Social media platforms have become a ubiquitous feature of modern life (Rosen, 2022; Carpenter et al., 2023; Meikle, 2024), and the term ‘influencer’ has, for the most part, entered common parlance. It is also seeping into education discourse and is likely to become more prominent in years to come as influencers in the education sector become more common but, in the interim, a better understanding of this phenomenon is needed. As in other areas, there are already influencers operating, to varying extents, in the education sector but as researchers already working in this space have been flagging, influencers remain greatly under researched in education (Shelton et al., 2020; Arantes and Buchanan, 2023; Carpenter et al., 2023; Schroeder et al., 2024), as do the related matters of teacher brand ambassador programmes (Saldaña et al., 2021) and teachers’ use of online education resource marketplaces (Carpenter and Shelton, 2024).

This paper will add to and extend on the limited existing scholarship by conceptualising and defining ‘influencer teachers’. We proffer ‘influencer teachers’ as a new kind of identity and set of social practices made possible by social media platforms, something which we feel has been insufficiently problematised to date. Like the stance of Hartung et al. (2023), we are not concerned with placing judgement on whether any particular social media platform is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for teachers here, and we follow Ideland and Serder’s (2023, p.860) stance of going beyond the common ‘commercial actors equal bad education’ discourse as the situation is more complex than that. As Hogan et al. (2018, p.627) have also insisted, ‘commercial = bad’ tropes can divert attention away from key questions worth focusing on. Rather than denouncing influencers here, we seek to understand their constitution and ask: who are they? What do they do? Why should they be known as ‘influencer teachers’? Given that there is a paucity of academic work in this space, by spotlighting influencer teachers here we envisage that it will instigate further research from others, and in providing a conceptualisation and definition of influencer teachers we hope to enable more meaningful and productive conversations and aid the research of others.