Highlighted Session: Capitalizing (on) a Global Learning Crisis: EdTech and the Political

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

Overview of Presentation: Recent comparative and international education scholarship has offered crucial insights into the manner that EdTech is producing new forms of capitalization (Moeller et al., 2024) through technologies like artificial intelligence, learning management systems, and results-based financing, to name only a few (see Birch et al., 2025; Komljenovic et. al., 2024). This symposium analyzes how these technological developments are fabricating a future amenable to financial manipulation by capitalizing (on) a global learning crisis. From this point of view, the ‘crisis’ can be understood not as a given fact, but as an effect of the very system intended to address it. The crisis is the production of uncertainties that demand perpetual management through diverse forms of anticipatory governance frequently tied to financial markets, often done in the name of promoting and promising resilience (Halpern, 2025).

Objectives of the session: Papers in this session approach the global learning crisis not as a given but as an effect of a constellation of practices from diverse domains including economics, the learning sciences, and systems analyses. Drawing on social theory, including Black geographies, critical quantification studies, feminist political economy, and science and technology studies, the papers in this symposium address both the what and the how of capitalization. This includes the political and economic manipulations within results-based financing models in West Africa, the design of learning management systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, the capitalization of artificial intelligence through student data extraction, and the advancement of digital badges and micro-credentials as an alternative to standardized tests in the UK. Across these papers, of central concern is how seemingly neutral practices of education policymaking and reform—objects, tools, and strategies—directed toward addressing ‘learning poverty’ and ‘achievement gaps’ are also fabricating a future amenable to financial speculation, one that governs the present while further embedding unequal power relations within schools, educational systems, networks, and policies.

Scholarly significance: The panel’s focus on capitalization—whether analyzed as tactics of policy implementation, techniques of digitalization, datafication, and quantification, or through historicizing its epistemological conditions of intelligibility—contributes to ongoing efforts in comparative and international education to grapple with the manner that educational governance must be examined as not primarily a spatial phenomenon but as one that acts on time as well by colonizing the future (Mitchell, 2020). In this manner, the panel offers insights into the manner that EdTech and related governing technologies naturalize not only how a ‘global learning crisis’ in its many manifestations is thought about and acted on, but also how its ‘solutions’ must be achieved through relations of that promise to anticipate new forms of value and profit.

Structure of the Session: Following an introduction from the chair, each author will give a 10–12-minute presentation of their work followed by an 8–10 minute response from a field-leading scholar. The chair will then moderate audience questions and dialogue.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Organizer

• Chris Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Chair

• Kathryn Moeller

Individual Presentations

• The Colonial Residues of Anticipatory Governance: Historicizing the Technopolitics of Learning Management Systems in Transnational School Reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa - Chris Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin–Madison

• “Literally Gold”: The Value and Vulnerability of Children’s Data in the Age of AI - Kathryn Moeller

• Gaining ground in the assessment battlefield: the advancement of digital badges and micro-credentials in UK - Diego Santori, King's College London

Discussant

• Susan Lee Robertson, The University of Manchester