Political Economy of EdTech: Analyses of the Racialized, Gendered, and Classed Dimensions of EdTech in the Global Economy

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

This symposium presents a series of papers that consider the relationships between race, gender, class, and technology in education and capitalism in the 21st century. It explores the emergence of new technologies in education and how they produce new configurations of power and knowledge. It proposes that while these new technologies are promoted as unbiased and apolitical means to empower all, in practice they work to standardize, digitalize, and control, continuing or exacerbating inequalities across multiple axes of difference and forms of exploitation inherent within the capitalist system.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education

Papers

• Venture Capitalists as Educational Actors: Understanding the Racialized and Gendered Political Economy of Silicon Valley Investments in Education Technology - Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge; Klint Kanopka, Stanford University; Joanna French, Innovate Schools

• Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era - Matthew Rafalow, Google Inc

• Global Finance, Technocapital, and Schooling the World's Poor - Sangeeta Kamat, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Corporate Bonds: Corporatized Development, Racial Capitalism, and Dispossession - Tyler Hook, University of Wisconsin - Madison