From “Death-worlds” to “Otherwise Worlds”- An Exploration of the Political Economy of EdTech Investments

• In Event: Interrogating Education, Technology & Capitalism in Chicago and Beyond

Proposal

In the aftermath of the Ebola crisis, Liberia and Sierra Leone enacted new forms of educational investment and governance through the Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP) and the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC). These policies aimed to remake education through the implementation of results-based funding models and the outsourcing of public primary schools to largely international for-profit school management firms. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the school management firms involved in LEAP and SLEIC have rebranded themselves as edtech companies, standardizing curriculum and teacher methods through tablets that simultaneously collect and compile student and community data, supposedly to improve learning outcomes. While advocates claim that edtech is helping to deliver more accountable, transparent, and effective school management, the issues of who is profiting from these investments, and to what extent these companies are breaking with or reproducing existing systems of inequality and injustice, remain understudied.

This paper draws on theories of racial capitalism (Beckford 1999; Robinson 2000) to critically examine the capital flows and labor regimes operating in West Africa (Liberia and Sierra Leone) through LEAP and SLEIC. The paper presents the global networks and capital flows that are generated by these two policies, revealing how the edtech companies involved, and the Global Education Industry (GEI) more broadly, utilize enclosure (Sojoyner 2016) and frontier capitalism (Tsing 2003) to capture public spaces for the benefit of global capital. The paper not only demonstrates how investment intended for local education systems in West Africa is redirected to actors in the US and Europe, but also how these companies and broader corporate networks employ highly racialized and extractive labor regimes. Drawing on 27 months of fieldwork across both Liberia and Sierra Leone, network analysis, and corporate audits, this paper shows how these hierarchical, gendered, and racialized labor regimes favor overwhelmingly white investors and managers, who are highly mobile and rarely held accountable, while the mostly black local labor is immobile, highly surveilled, and often unpaid. I argue that this results in local labor occupying what Mbembe (2019) describes as a "death-world" where workers are "subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the 'living dead" (92).

While the paper critically examines these labor regimes and the capital flows that sustain them, it also looks at how communities in West Africa are both reworking and resisting these extractive models to create new systems based on local understandings of community and care. The paper closes by advocating for reparative (material and epistemic) justice in education (Sriprakash 2023) through the concept of "dis(en)closure" (Author 2024).

Author

• Tyler J Hook, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania