L.05. Living together, Co-Governing, Becoming: More-than-Human Futures for Democracy in Education
This panel interrogates the democratic implications of more-than-human education governance in a period of accelerating technoscientific transformation (Landri and Peruzzo, 2026 forthcoming). It challenges the persistent anthropocentrism underpinning dominant accounts of education governance, arguing that governing processes are now enacted through dense assemblages of human actors, digital infrastructures, algorithms, platforms, data systems, and ecological materialities (Hayles, 2023; Gulson et al, 2021). Posthuman perspectives, we suggest, are essential for understanding how AI, robotics, datafication, and platformisation are reconfiguring democratic learning, ethical responsibility, and civic participation.
The panel examines how more-than-human governance redistributes agency, authority, and responsibility in hybrid educational environments where humans do not simply govern technologies and nonhuman entities but increasingly co-govern with them. The discussion will address: (1) the political ecologies of digital governance, in which public–private infrastructures and Big EdTech actors shape the conditions of educational democracy; (2) the affective atmospheres generated by algorithmic systems, rankings, and AI-driven pedagogies, and their consequences for participation, consent, and resistance; and (3)the ambivalent symbioses that emerge among learners, educators, technologies, and planetary resources, symbioses that may entrench extractivist, inequitable logics or foster convivial, sustainable futures.
Mobilising post-anthropocentric and new materialist analytics, the panel reframes democratic education as a more-than-human project embedded in contested sociotechnical and ecological assemblages. It argues that sustaining democracy in education requires not a defence of human exceptionalism but a politics of coexistence, care, and response-ability across human and nonhuman agents. The panel positions this reorientation as both analytically urgent and politically generative for reimagining education’s democratic futures.