We start from an exemplary illustration of the intersection of education, democracy, and social justice. Quite recently one of us visited a museum in the US, noticing that one of the exhibits, detailing the period of the colonization of the Native American people’s land, was removed from the exhibition with the following message:

As part of the upcoming redesign of this exhibition and ongoing collections research, we have discovered that some objects were not appropriate for display and have been removed from view for further research and consultation with indigenous communities.

In the name of social justice and the ideals of equity and political correctness, the decision had been made to censor the exhibition. Perhaps this happened out of the best of intentions and from a genuine political and pedagogical concern. But, by removing an artifact from public display, it was made impossible for visitors to think for themselves and to autonomously study the removed item.

Starting with this example, we would like to problematize the currently dominant conviction that education and democracy are principally connected to the idea(l) of social justice. It is assumed that political action as well as education are (all) about providing equity. However, when education is put at the service of this ideal it is threatened in its integrity (Biesta 2022). Following Arendt (1961), education is a matter of the existing generation welcoming and introducing the newcomers to the common world. Hence, when subordinated to the ideal of social justice, school gets burdened with tasks reserved for the sphere of politics (i.e. the interaction between adults who have the responsibility to set the world straight). Put differently, although it is just to provide education for all, one cannot achieve justice through education. Educational equality is a starting point, and not a pedagogical goal to achieve (Cf. Rancière 1991).

Moreover, although there is no democracy without equality, the essence of democratic politics is not social justice. Rather, it is about bringing a plurality of (agonistic) voices together, so that certain issues become public. Fundamentally, as Adriana Cavarero (2021) argues, democracy is a quality of human interrelations. It refers to an arrangement which allows for gathering people. When we are solely focused on justice and equity such a gathering is rendered impossible (e.g. because certain things mustn’t be discussed as they’re found oppressive).

The main point is that a preoccupation with social justice imperils the possibility of gathering in both the public and educational interaction. When various aspects of the world are removed/cancelled, politics is ontologically threatened since a genuine gathering around the deleted part of the world is prohibited to exist. Likewise, education is thwarted ontologically: we can no longer join together around the thing in order to explore it, research it, discuss it and make up our minds about it. Study has been jeopardized. In view of this, we propose a genuinely educational approach towards issues of social (in)justice that, instead of removing these from sight, would allow us to study them collectively.

The digitalization of educational settings is often associated with the idea that it could enable a positive change in social justice. There is the hope that through digital tools more people could participate in (online) discussions. Obviously, the participation in the digital world is only possible for the ones that possess reliable tools to enter it. In this paper, I do not want to focus on this materialistic perspective. I rather want to address – with the help of Hannah Arendt’s ideas – three other concerns in relation to the promise of social justice through digitalization in education:

1. Social media is confused with a public space.
2. The isolating experience in using digital tools stands in contrast to the collectiveness of educational settings.
3. Educational responsibility is lost when digital tools are in charge of education.

1) Arendt’s critique of social spaces as spheres of discrimination (cf. Arendt 1959: 51ff) has some flaws but can be considered very helpful for questioning the publicness of social media platforms as well as the educational value of digital learning tools. She describes the social sphere in contrast to the public: “Society is that curious, somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private […]. For each time we leave the protective four walls of our private homes and cross over the threshold into the public world, we enter first, not the political realm of equality, but the social sphere” (ibid.: 51). This description seems to capture one of the most important characteristics of Social Media: its hybrid form, not being fully public nor fully private.

2) In relation to Arendt’s thought, the importance of collectivity can be underlined. In her analysis of totalitarianism, she points out how important a certain kind of belongingness is in contrast to different forms of isolation (cf. Arendt 1951: 623ff). Her differentiation of loneliness, isolation and solitude can be helpful to understand the isolating experiences that are related to using digital tools. In how far, certain settings of educational interaction can be simulated in digital spaces will be another question of the paper.

3) The importance of taking over responsibility for the content that is taught by teachers is one of the key arguments of Arendt’s famous essay “The Crisis in Education” (1958). This responsibility is lost when learning platforms and tools like ChatGPT are left in charge of education. Algorithms are not transparent in how they choose certain content and how they explain it. Learning platforms and their tools are blind to the conditions of their users. However, that this blindness cannot be confused with the post-critical “assumption of equality” (cf. Hodgson/Vlieghe/Zamojski 2017: 17) will be another argument of this paper.

The post-critical viewpoint will be understood as a perspective that emphasizes the relationality between people (cf. ibid.: 16). Moreover, the post-critical perspective focusses on the experience of education as an important activity in itself. The digitalization of educational settings will be analyzed as an example to understand the relation between education and social justice from a post-critical viewpoint.

Historically, the core of the sociology of education has been and remains the understanding of the production and (re)production of inequality (Gewirtz and Cribb, 2009, Ball 2008)). As a knowledge program, sociology shares some basic assumptions of modern education: the logic of salvation, redemption, and a commitment to social justice. By criticizing the model of ‘homo oeconomicus’, the sociology of education is interested in promoting the principle of equality that appears as a compelling societal demand to which subordinate education as a practice. Therefore, the exercise of sociological critique has traditionally been to unmask the rhetoric of the equality of opportunity to identify the basic social mechanisms of the reproduction of inequality behind the scenes. While this exercise has often been (and is) sound, it risks producing disengagement and hate for the world. It spreads a logic of suspicion towards education, considered fiction, a deceiving spectacle. Drawing on a post-critical view (Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamoiski 2017) implies a reframing of the sociology of education, one in which the nexus of education and social justice is enacted differently. Such reframing occurs in socio-material education studies (T. Fenwick e Edwards 2019; Tara Fenwick e Edwards 2010; Gorur et al. 2019; Landri e Gorur 2022). Socio-material studies explore education as world-making, that is, as a (re)assemblage of people, technologies, and things. In this world-making activity, social (in)justice becomes an emergent quality of the educational assemblages. Whereas in classical sociological accounts, social (in)justice is transcendent in socio-material studies, social (in)justice it is immanent in education. In this frame, the sociology of education is invited to illustrate the situated and material conditions of educational assemblages responsible, at the same time, for social (in)justice.

To illustrate how sociomaterial studies draw attention to the situated enactment of social (in)justice in educational assemblages, the paper will present a brief case study on ‘Unica’, a platform of the Italian Ministry of Education. Adding to the critical investigations of the digital education platform (Decuypere, Grimaldi, e Landri 2021), the case study illustrates how social (in)justice is seen not as something external - but as a quality of educational assemblages. The paper will conclude by considering how the post-critical sociology of education does not consider social (in)justice at the start of the investigation or as a distant future to be reached as an effect of the foreseen transformation of education that reproduces and legitimises the very discourse of inequality (like as being argued by following Ranciere) (Simons e Masschelein 2010). In so doing, this sociology is rather interested in seeing how humans and nonhumans participate in the (re)production of social (in)justice by paying particular attention to the role of knowledge and academic disciplines in performing and supporting inclusion/exclusion in educational assemblages.

The following abstract will attempt to outline an educational project which aims to affirm the capabilities of students to be open towards the world and to articulate themselves in it. We will do this by drawing on post-critical strands of both sociology and educational studies grounded in a more positive account of the world, rather than a hermeneutics of suspicion. Similarly, as Boltanski and Thévenot have done with their sociology of critique as opposed to critical sociology, the agent is again foregrounded as capable of pragmatically positioning themselves in relation to a social structure (Boltanski & Thévenot 1991; Boltanski, 2009). Agents are here capable of articulating critique themselves and don’t need critical social theorist for it. Similarly, this project wishes to emphasize the capabilities of a certain set of actors, students. For this we will make reference to a new educational project which we call Education of the Senses.

Education of the senses (henceforth EoS) starts from our ontological openness towards the world and our capability to pragmatically articulate our experiences of the world. EoS wants to emphasize and cultivate these basic ontological capabilities and to make us more attentive to the world, to experience and see more of it and enable us to articulate these experiences further. For us, such a program can be related to a post-critical perspective and a profound love for the world (Hodgson et al. 2020). This because such an emphasis means to generate an openness to what the world is asking of us (Vansieleghem, 2021). EoS is about doing justice to the variety of modes of experiencing the world and our capability to use language to integrate these experiences in discourse ultimately enriching and intensifying our experiences.

This leads us back to certain themes of critical sociology. Allowing students, the time and space to articulate their individual experiences can make pervasive problems come up. More importantly, the students become conscious of these problems through firsthand experience in reflection or interaction. In this way the students are not taken to be naïve and do not have to be thought how to be emancipated, rather, the teacher allows for students to bring in their own insights which they can articulate in a spirit of openness to others. In this way students are given the opportunity to further their understanding of the phenomena happening around them, both from their own perspective and that of others. Through this, students themselves can construct common discourses which adequately capture their shared experiences or account for the disjunction between their lifeworlds.

That said, the ‘goal’ of an EoS is not to find some alternative means to activate critical awareness, EoS is fundamentally about a love for the world, not a way to generate even more suspicion towards it. It is rather to refer to what we believe to be an essential task of pedagogy, namely, to enrich the lifeworlds of students. In this perspective the world is seen as something intrinsically valuable which everyone should be able to meaningfully engage with.

Whereas the main reforms enacted in post-WWII democratisation of education were based on the principle of equality of opportunity, the semantics of inclusion have progressively shaped most international conventions on education over the past decade (Husson & Pérez, 2016; Norwich, 2014; Reverdy 2019). This model has rapidly spread throughout the world, under the impetus of international organizations such as OECD or UNESCO, reconfiguring the language used to express desirable perspectives (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999) for education systems and organisations.

In this contribution, we aim to uncover the normative assumptions underpinning the inclusive education paradigm. In order to contribute to this panel, dedicated to “post-critical” perspectives related to education and social justice, we step away from an interpretation of the “raise of the inclusion paradigm” as simply reflecting the neoliberal agenda.

We first sustain that “inclusion” as a normative horizon for education is in line with the parameters of the social grammar of reflexive globalised societies (Beck, 2006) : it places education into a new “open” temporality”, considering it as an incremental process of individual self-development; it regards individuals (learners) both through their vulnerability/risks and potential (Genard) ; it requests educational systems and organisations to be accessible (Ebersold) and responsive to the whole range of diverse, singular human beings. The inclusive school promotes autonomy and agency, pretending to equip them to become decision-makers and action-takers in a plural and changing world.

We then argue that, as long as it reflects the new social grammar of late modernity, the “inclusion” perspective requires new analytical lens to critically examine it in terms of social justice. To this end, we systematically explore the heuristic potential of three main social justice theories (redistribution, recognition and capability).

In our view, the two most convincing theoretical apparatus are recognition theory (Honneth, 1999, 2000, 2002), which focuses on the social conditions of self-fulfilment, and the capability approach (CA), which focuses on real freedom to carry out the life courses that are personally valued (Sen, 1992, 1993, 1999; Saito 2003; Nussbaum 2006). Both reflect the individualised and capacitating grammar of the second modernity. The recognitive perspective highlights the new claims of interpersonal respect, rights and social utility; the capability approach echoes the emphasis put on talents and potentialities and on real freedom to accomplish oneself through social participation. However, the concern for equality and the redistributive dimensions of justice (Rawls, 1971) has not deserted the education field and is still visible in this new “inclusion” approach, but has shifted in new formulations, emphasizing rights and open-ended opportunities.

These approaches can be envisaged as complementary analytical tools echoing the semantics of the inclusive education framework, but also as a useful critical apparatus for its normative assessment. Each allows to identify certain points in which extra care must be taken regarding the concrete deployment of the inclusion paradigm – particularly in its most instrumental or individualistic (de-socialised) translations. They also reveal that principles of equality of places or conditions have been progressively silenced.