Conference Agenda

During the last decade, we have seen a rise of critical discussion on education technology (edtech) throughout Europe. This has been seen in calls for digital degrowth and more sustainable edtech futures (Selwyn, 2025); projects that seek to build digital sovereignty and curb dependency on Big Tech infrastructures. At present, however, emerging post-platform futures (Macgilchrist et al., 2024) are being challenged by two developments. Firstly, there is a sudden digital backlash that manifests as phone and social media bans targeted at children and young people. Secondly, on a European level, legislative measures aimed to control Big Tech are facing resistance and being rolled back.

This symposium is an attempt to map the situation and investigate the potential futures for post-plaftorm edtech. We posit a need for approaches that retain a critical focus on platform capitalism and approach edtech from a sociological and political viewpoint. At present, the digital backlash is defined by 1) a focus on individuals instead of societal structures, consequently situating the problem on the level of individual students instead of platform capitalist enterprises; 2) a tendency to seek solutions from prohibitions and limitations; 3) an emphasis on limiting the actions of young people but leaving Big Tech corporate actors untouched; 4) an underlying drive towards an idea of ‘analogue school’ which may nevertheless overlook the significance of digital infrastructures and the need to rethink them.

The above-mentioned developments have been often treated as separate elements, resulting in a crucial knowledge gap that neglects evident tensions. While these different reactions partly align, in some aspects they run either contrary to or separate from each other. For example, the demand to reduce technology use of children and young people through mobile and social media bans to protect their cognitive abilities and wellbeing may reduce their overall tech use, and therefore also the environmental impact of technology in line with digital degrowth demands. However, digital backlash does not appear equally interested in all technology (Forsler et al., 2025), such as learning management systems and other deeply integrated data infrastructures, which means that the limitation of environmental impact remains insufficient. Likewise, digital degrowth demands to reduce the overall (technologically amplified) environmental impact of different sectors by reducing dependence on US technological imperialism (Kwet, 2024) are in line with ideas of digital sovereignty (Rikap et al., 2024). However, if these demands are met with a construction of overlapping digital infrastructure, such as additional European data centers and AI language models, overall ecological burden only increases and desired environmental benefits get neutralized.

Building on this foundation, our aim for this symposium is threefold: 1) to explore current European developments concepts such as post-platform pedagogies, digital autonomy, and digital backlash through research presentations based on on-going work on the topic, 2) to bring different perspectives into dialogue in order to find solutions for the tensions between them, 3) provide a contribution of rethinking post-platform education in Europe. Overall, symposium creates space for reflecting on the possibilities of post-platform pedagogies from the perspectives of the users, the public sector, and design and development. The symposium is organized by Lauri Palsa and Antti Paakkari and will be accompanied by critical remarks from Annika Bergviken Rensfeldt and Pekka Mertala, and a Q&A with audience.

The digital backlash in education can be understood as part of a broader shift in the public debate in which the use of digital technologies, particularly personal devices such as smartphones, is increasingly framed as problematic (Albris et al., 2024). As in earlier debates around new media and technologies, children and young people are positioned as especially vulnerable. This may explain why policy reforms that resonate with widespread public concerns about children and screens – such as mobile phone bans or a return to analogue media in schools – have gained such popularity and can can be mobilised in political debate. In this presentation, Sweden is used as an example of a national case where the digital backlash in education has gained a strong foothold and where de-digitalisation politics have been used to position current policy agendas in opposition to what is retrospectively described as an overly hasty or uncritical digitalization of the public school system (Forsler & Guyard 2023 ). This development coincides with, and is reinforced by, an emerging knowledge paradigm in education that prioritises a cognitive-scientific understanding of learning (Kotouza et al., 2025). Within this paradigm, learning is framed primarily as a process taking place in the brain of the individual student, while social, cultural, and contextual perspectives are less prominent. Applied to digital technologies in schools, this perspective treats technology use in itself as having negative effects on cognitive development, learning, and memory, largely independent of how of where it is used ot for what ends. The digital backlash in education can therefore be seen not only as a reaction to technology as such, but also as part of a broader epistemic shift that reshapes how educational problems and solutions are defined. Within this framework, references to “science” are mobilised to justify and legitimise anti-digitalisation policies. This development risks silencing other perspectives and forms of knowledge, which also undermines the potential of the digital backlash to open up genuinely new ways of thinking about education beyond current platform logics.

Albris, K., Fast, K., Karlsen, F., Kaun, A., Lomborg, S., & Syvertsen, T. (Eds.) (2024). The Digital Backlash and the Paradoxes of Disconnection. Nordicom. https://doi.org/10.48335/9789188855961 Forsler, I., & Guyard, C. (2023). Screens, teens and their brains. Discourses about digital media, learning and cognitive development in popular science neuroeducation. Learning, Media and Technology, 50(2), 191–204. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2023.2230893 Kotouza, D., Pickersgill, M., Pykett, J., & Williamson, B. (2025). Brokering the brain: Neuroscientific knowledge, technologies, and the translation of neuro-expertise into educational practice. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 0(0), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2025.2567657

Across many European societies, particularly in the Nordic countries, education policy has been guided by a strong commitment to deepening digitalisation. At the same time, growing attention to the environmental burden of digital technologies challenges the assumption that continued expansion of digitalisation is inherently desirable. However, current education policy debates offer limited conceptual tools for addressing sustainability in education systems that are already deeply digitalised. This creates a need to rethink the role of digital technologies beyond growth-oriented imaginaries. The technology sector is estimated to account for approximately 1.5–4% of global carbon emissions (World Bank Group, 2024.). These impacts arise not only from individual devices and everyday digital practices, but also from the extensive infrastructures underpinning digitalisation, including data cable networks, data centres supporting cloud services, and the energy, water, and natural resources required for training AI language models. Digital degrowth has been proposed as an approach to strengthening sustainability across all phases of the technological life cycle (Selwyn, 2025; Kwet, 2024). By reducing technological expansion, digital degrowth aims to decrease the consumption of finite natural resources, the environmental burden of technology use, and the accumulation of electronic waste. However, digitalisation in education is not merely a matter of devices, but involves deeper transformations in practices, infrastructures, and human–machine configurations. In this presentation, we argue that digital degrowth in education requires sensitivity to the multi-dimensional and contextual nature of digitalisation. In deeply digitalised education systems, digital degrowth cannot be approached as simple technological reduction; rather, it demands reconfigurations of established practices and sociotechnical arrangements. We examine the possibilities and tensions of digital degrowth through a conceptual and policy-oriented analysis of a particular ”Valssi” platform development as an information rich case within the Finnish education system as an example of a highly digitalised context. We argue that through an examination of the Valssi platform we can tease out the following central features of digital degrowth: scalability, flexibility, connection with existing practices, and the accommodation of both analogue and digital. By positioning digital degrowth within post-platform debates, this presentation contributes to diversifying current understandings of sustainable educational digitalisation. It highlights points of connection with broader technological development trends, including digital backlash and digital sovereignty, and advances digital degrowth as a critical framework for rethinking the future of digitalised education systems.

Kwet, M. (2024). Digital degrowth: Technology in the age of survival. Pluto Press. Selwyn, N. (2025). Digital degrowth: Radically rethinking our digital futures. Polity. World Bank Group. (2024). Measuring the Emissions and Energy Footprint of the ICT Sector: Implications for Climate Action. The World Bank. https://doi.org/10.1596/41238

Across Europe, education has become increasingly dependent on Big Tech platforms, data infrastructures, and AI-driven systems that profoundly shape how teaching, learning, and educational governance are organized (Kerssens & Van Dijck, 2022). In response to such growing technological dependencies, recent European policy debates have foregrounded digital sovereignty as a strategy for regaining control over digital infrastructures through regulation and market investments (Bria, Timmers, & Gernone, 2025). While politically salient, this paper argues that these predominantly top-down and market-centric framings remain insufficient for addressing the democratic deficit underpinning the digitalization of education (Cone & Lai, 2025). Instead, we propose digital autonomy as both a practical precondition and pedagogical opportunity for reasserting deliberation, contestation, and inquiry as core aspects of democratic life in and through education. Our argument is grounded in democratic education theory, drawing on John Dewey’s pragmatist conception of democracy as a form of communication that must be learned, practiced, and continually renewed, (Dewey, 2004 [1916]). From this perspective, democracy is not merely something schools prepare students for, but something that must be actively lived and experienced through practices of self-determination and participation (Arendt, 1964). Situated within this normative horizon of democratic education, the paper draws on the work of Illich (2013 [1971]) to conceptualize digital autonomy as a procedural – and ultimately more educational – alternative to prevailing notions of technological sovereignty. As such, it positions digital autonomy as a pedagogical tool for re-centering the self-determining practices underpinning democratic life at a moment when schools and other “public” institutions are increasingly imbricated in corporate, monopolistic, and ecologically consequential digital ecosystems (Selwyn, 2025). Against this theoretical backdrop, the paper observes a rapid proliferation of such alternative practices already emerging across Europe – in schools, municipalities, and teacher networks – as part of a wider movement toward digital autonomy in public education. Based on a review of this field, the paper proposes five analytical pathways for reclaiming digital autonomy in European education: imaginaries, infrastructures, professionalities, design, and governance. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions or policy templates, these pathways articulate a research agenda for studying digital autonomy as a lived, relational, and future-oriented practice. Together, they offer conceptual entry points for analyzing how democratic agency is currently being reconfigured in efforts to do digital education differently, and for demonstrating why digital autonomy is not a peripheral concern, but a necessary condition for sustaining the democratic function of education in a platform society.

Arendt, H. (2018 [1958]). The Human Condition. The University of Chicago Press. Bria, F., Timmers, P., & Gernone, F. (2025). EuroStack: A European alternative for digital sovereignty. Bertelsmann Stiftung. Cone, L., & Lai, S.S. (2025). Infrastructural dependency in the datafied welfare state: the case of Google Chromebooks. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-17. Dewey, J. (2004 [1916]). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. Dover Publications. Illich, I. (2013 [1971]). Deschooling society. Marion Boyars Kerssens, N., & Dijck, J.V.. 2022. "Governed by Edtech? Valuing Pedagogical Autonomy in a Platform Society." Harvard Educational Review 92 (2):284-303. doi: https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-92.2.284. Selwyn, N. (2025). Digital Degrowth: Radically Rethinking our Digital Futures. Wiley.